Category: Opinion

I am proud to say that I successfully managed a blog post per day for the month of November. Unlike NaNoWriMo, the requirement wasn’t for a specific number of words. There wasn’t a way to finish early and meet the requirement. Instead I had to blog every day.

In the beginning, I thought I’d blog both here and at my academic blog – http://rjh.goingeast.ca. Unfortunately, as work got busier, something had to drop. I chose then to drop my posts at my other blog and continue blogging here. In part because i had so much more inspiration for this blog. I had a lot more to draw upon for inspiration.

I did find #nablopomo useful as a way to encourage me to write every day. It was a good way to help me get back into the practice of regular blogging and regular writing – two things that I’m going to need to do when I go back to my PhD studies in January.

I do not think that I will be continuing to post to this blog on a daily-basis – however, I do expect that I’ll be blogging every few days. I’ll also be posting more over at my academic blog which I have been neglecting lately – as I had to prioritize writing a post per day for this blog.  With every choice I make to do something, it is also a choice to not do something else. There are, unfortunately, only so many hours in the day.

And so, with December being upon us, I shall plan to spend more time with my hubby, more time in nature, and more time mentally preparing to re-engage with PhD studies …. life must go on.

I heard a statistic the other night. I’m not sure of its source, but I wanted to demonstrate a logical fallacy.

The statistic I heard was that 70% of women with metastatic breast cancer were diagnosed with metastatic cancer at initial diagnosis. What this means is that 70% of the women living with metastatic breast cancer were metastatic when diagnosed. What this does not mean is that 30% of women diagnosed with breast cancer are early stage. It also does not mean that 30% of women who are diagnosed early stage will become metastatic.

You see, in each case the denominator is changing. They are independent statistics. In the first you are saying that of all the women with mets today, 70% had mets when they were diagnosed.

The second statistic is about all women. So the numbers are in no way related to one another.

The third statistic is about all women who were diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. So again, the numbers are  in no way related to another another.

Each statistics is fundamentally different – they have different denominators. One of the numbers tells you nothing about the other numbers, because the groups involved are fundamentally different.

So, it leaves me wondering, where does the 30% of all breast cancers will progress to metastatic come from? This is a great mystery, but I found myself wondering, is it simply a matter of someone not understanding the math? Someone not understanding that 70% of something does not imply 30% of something different, even if that something different kinda sounds like the opposite of the 70%?

I don’t know, but I’ve learned to be careful when I hear numbers thrown around. So I make no promises that any of the numbers that I’ve stated above are in any way correct numbers. I just wanted to demonstrate the point that it is easy to think numbers are related to one another, when in fact they are completely different statistics.

I don’t often follow celebrity experiences with breast cancer. For the most part, they annoy me. They try too much to simplify the experience into a single message – often one that is overly simple, not accounting for the complexities of the disease and the women who have to face it.

It was with this not so positive attitude that I decided to watch the short clip of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt on the today show. I was immediately impressed with the way in which they shared her recent scare. How authentic it felt. There was no preaching about what the “right way” to be a previvor.

Previvor is a term used for those with the genetic mutation (typically BRCA or BRCA2) that puts women and men at significant risk for breast or ovarian cancer, but have not yet been diagnosed with an invasive form of the cancer. I use the term “not yet” intentionally, as some of the statistics for those carrying the gene are staggering.

Since I don’t carry the BRCA gene, I haven’t done much research into that area. I did, however, find a great too created by Stanford Researchers to help women with the BRCA genes understand the different risks based upon their age and treatment options: Decision Tool for Women with BRCA mutations.

I do think the decisions that previvors need to make are in many ways a lot more difficult than the decisions those of us with invasive cancer have to make. I didn’t really have that many choices to make. I had a lot of invasive cancer. All my surgeons agreed that bilateral mastectomy was the recommended surgical treatment. I was not having to decide to remove healthy tissue that may never develop into cancer. I had cancer in both breasts – there was nothing prophylactic about my treatment. I cannot even begin to understand how difficult that decision would be – but Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt do a great job of helping to show the complexity of some of those emotions.