In spite of increasing rates of survival, George Johnson argues for “learning to expect less from the war on cancer”:
Whether you look at the incidence, mortality, or survivability of cancer, most of the progress has come from simpler solutions: smoking prevention, pap smears, HPV vaccines. The high-tech approaches — the targeted drugs like Herceptin, Perjeta, Kadcyla, and the experimental immunotherapies so much in the news — have yet to prove themselves, particularly with metastatic cancer, which accounts for almost all cancer deaths. …
No matter how effective any of the new therapies or their successors might turn out to be, there is not going to be a complete victory in the war on cancer. We have to die of something. For every success in combatting other diseases, more people will be left to ultimately succumb to the breakdown of cellular functions that we call cancer. That is a number that can still be reduced but only somewhat.
My doc reminded me this week that as a long-term HIV survivor, my own likelihood of cancer is about 25 percent more than the average bear. I get my colonoscopy soon. For some reason, after surgery, after a battery of tests, fear returned today – fear of dying too soon, fear of having too much left to do, fear of leaving those I love. It hovers again at you around the edges after so many years of keeping it confidently and aggressively at bay,
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
And then decision.
The Dish 