July 10, 2016 — Living Beyond

Last December, I wrote a blog entry acknowledging the tenth anniversary of my first cancer diagnosis. I dared to hope it could be a sort of capstone for this meandering project. Maybe I was finally out of the woods. Maybe ten years meant I was “cancer-free.”                                    
Recent events have proven otherwise. My December annual visit to Dr. Stephanie Fish, my endocrinologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, turned up some abnormalities in an ultrasound of my neck. Several tiny nodules had appeared in my thyroid bed — the area where the thyroid gland had once been — that looked worrisome.  Dr. Fish reassured me that it was too early to tell if this was significant, but arranged for me to come back for another ultrasound in six months.

I’ve now had that follow-up test. Dr. Fish informed me there are unmistakable “signs of disease” in the thyroid bed, as well as some swelling of nearby lymph nodes. The usual treatment for recurrent thyroid cancer, she explained, is further surgery. Because I already had a routine follow-up scheduled with Dr. Jay Boyle — my thyroid surgeon — she told me I should ask him what treatment options he recommends.

Last week, Claire and I drove up to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering satellite clinic in Basking Ridge, New Jersey to see Dr. Boyle. He confirmed everything Dr. Fish had told me. The thyroid cancer is back. The truth is, it probably never left me. He’d warned me back then that it’s difficult to surgically remove every microscopic bit of thyroid tissue. That’s the reason for the radioactive iodine treatment I’d had at the time: it’s a precautionary cleanup of the whole area. But it’s not always 100% effective.

As for the lymph-node involvement, he told me that was visible even at the time of my surgery, but is of no greater concern than the newly-appeared nodules.

Well, what’s ahead? A biopsy?

The nodules are too small to biopsy.

A further radioactive iodine treatment?

Not likely. That’s a one-time approach, much less effective on the second go-round.

What about further surgery?

The nodules, he explained, are still very tiny and are therefore hard to remove surgically. They’re also located in an inconvenient place, close to the nerve that controls my vocal cords. If I opt for surgery, there’s a 10% chance of permanent hoarseness as a side-effect. Dr. Boyle knows as well as I do that I make my living with my voice.           

As for the lymph nodes on the left side of my neck, they’re closer to the skin and therefore easier to remove, but that would require a large incision that would do damage to delicate neck tissue. Such an incision would make further surgery in that area — should it ever be required, down the road — problematic.

Better to postpone surgery, he advised. Thyroid cancer is typically slow-moving. At 59 years of age, I just may outlive it. If I do reach the point where surgery is indicated, it would be just as effective then as it would be now.

The treatment Dr. Boyle recommends is one that’s become familiar to me as a non-Hodgkin lymphoma survivor: watchful waiting. Dr. Fish has already ordered a follow-up ultrasound for six months from now. Dr. Boyle thinks that’s an appropriate precautionary step, but he doesn’t expect to see a big change.

A short while after our visit to Dr. Boyle, I had a conversation with a friend who’s a breast cancer survivor. She’s had a long series of surgeries and treatments. She, too, is not in any immediate danger, but her scans have revealed some recurrent disease.

My friend told me she’s stopped updating friends and family about every detail of her situation, because it’s hard for others to grasp what watchful waiting really means. “We’ll always have cancer,” she told me, frankly. “People who haven’t lived through it have a hard time understanding that. They don’t understand that the most aggressive treatment isn’t always the best choice.”

My situation exactly.

Recently I read a little article in Cure magazine by Mike Verano, a psychotherapist and cancer survivor. It’s called "Moving On After Cancer." Mike’s point is that few people are ever able to move on after cancer, to attain the much-heralded “closure.” Most cancers are simply not that sort of disease.

Mike has this to say:

“Thirty-plus years into the practice of psychotherapy, I’ve learned that telling someone that their recovery depends on ‘moving on’ is akin to telling a depressed person to just ‘be happy.’ My approach these days is to talk about living with rather than living without, allowing over forcing and, most importantly, realizing that life moves on in wellness and illness, joy and suffering, pleasure and pain. I firmly believe that illness does not halt this process; it does not put the brakes on existence. Feeling stuck comes from a trick of the mind that sees suffering, of any kind, as an unnecessary detour and waste of time.

Once we allow our lives to unfold with cancer as part of our experience, we awaken to the literal meaning of the word survive which is ‘to live beyond.’ This is the wisdom of being told that we become survivors on the day we receive our diagnosis. Thus, the need to discover the way ahead, to put psychological, emotional and spiritual distance between ourselves and the illness is already being met. Therefore, the work is often a matter of staying out of our own way as we move through this process.”

Survival as “living beyond”: I like that insight. It sounds positively theological. Jesus Christ says he has come that we “may have life, and have it abundantly.” It’s so very easy for us to ascribe to cancer the power to make this God-given life less abundant than it already is. Cancer has no such power.

We watch. We wait. We live. We love. We have cancer.

We live beyond.

August 27, 2012 – The Downside of Up Life-Expectancy

Here’s a jaw-dropping statistic: “Since 1900, the life expectancy of Americans has jumped to just shy of 80 from 47 years.”

Among so many significant developments of the 20th Century, this may be one of the most far-reaching: and it gets so little press, compared to advances in transportation, communications, electrical power, data-processing and all the rest.

Walk through any older graveyard, and take note of the lifespans cut into the 19th century headstones. Stroll over into the newer section, and do the same for the stones from the last decade or so.  Then, do the math.

You’ll experience your own little “Wow!” moment.

We’ve been making huge progress, as a society, fighting cancer – which partly explains the increase in life expectancy, of course. Yet, those numbers also do their part to blunt the remarkable gains in cancer prevention and treatment.  They make them seem less impressive than they really are.

Here’s why. 

We all know cancer is an old person’s disease.  Not every cancer, of course. Small numbers of the young can be afflicted as well, and it’s especially heartbreaking when that happens.  Yet, the chances of getting most cancers go up with each decade of life: way up, once you pass 60 or so.

In 1900, when people were dying at the age of 47, on the average, most of them were succumbing to other maladies before they even made it into the prime cancer years. So many cancers are influenced by genetics: at a certain age, some mysterious, pre-programmed switch in the DNA gets thrown into the “on” position. Then, some of our cells start morphing into predators and lunching on those around them.

Sometimes, I hear people of my generation comment with alarm on how many of their friends are getting moles cut off, or undergoing mastectomies, or following the same chemotherapy path I and a few others of us have unintentionally pioneered. The cancer rate must surely be going up, they exclaim!

It’s not – at least, not if the effects of aging are controlled for.  What’s going up is their age, and the age of their contemporaries.  That, in itself, accounts for a whole lot of cancers.

Want to know what the leading cause of cancer really is?  It’s getting old.

What a paradox! With each new advance in cancer treatment, average life expectancy goes up.  Yet, for all those cancers that are prevented or successfully treated, the chances of getting other cancers increase, due to the demographics.

You’ve really got to feel for the cancer researchers.  They work so hard, and they announce their latest successes in triumph, but their numbers don’t look nearly so good as they would, were the average lifespan not also increasing.  They’re walking up the down escalator.

In the August 25th New York Times, David Ewing Duncan poses the very reasonable, but creepy, question of whether some of these medical advances are really worth it. He says he’s in the habit of polling his lecture audiences, asking for a show of hands as to how long they truly want to live. “I provided,” he says, “four possible answers: 80 years, currently the average life span in the West; 120 years, close to the maximum anyone has lived; 150 years, which would require a biotech breakthrough; and forever, which rejects the idea that life span has to have any limit at all.”

Before voting, he tells his audiences, they should assume that aging, as we know it, would continue. His question is simply about longevity that could be gained through eliminating life-threatening illnesses, not a matter of freezing the normal aging process. He’s not offering the opportunity, in his thought-experiment, for people to remain forever 30, or 40, or whatever ideal degree of physical maturity they’d care to name.

The majority — 60% — say they don’t want to live past 80. Another 30% declare they’re willing to power on through all the usual infirmities of aging, finally dying at 120. Nearly another 10% want to boldly go where no one has gone before, and live to 150. Only a tiny fraction put up their hands to say they want to live longer than that.

Duncan goes on to report that medical researchers are on the verge of a number of breakthroughs that could push the average life expectancy up even higher. Among these are medications to reduce inflammation of the coronary arteries, as well as various stem-cell therapies. The growing field of bionics — developing replacement hardware for the body, like cardiac pacemakers, brain implants for Parkinson’s sufferers, even artificial hearts — offers to add even more years to the average age at death.

“Curiously,” Duncan goes on, “after learning about these possibilities, few people wanted to change their votes. Even if I asked them to imagine that a pill had been invented to slow aging down by one-half, allowing a person who is, say, 60 years old to have the body of a 30-year-old, only about 10 percent of audiences switched to favoring a life span of 150 years.”

For many of those who don’t want to change their vote, it’s the various infirmities of aging that scare them off.  For others, it’s concern for younger generations, who would find the staircases to so many joys and achievements blocked by their elders, shuffling around on the landings above them. For still others, it’s about worry for the environment — whether the earth can truly sustain very many more people than are already here.

The tiny minority who do want to live longer speculate that we have no way of knowing what such super-centenarians could accomplish, with their added wisdom and life-experience. What new gizmo could a genius like Steve Jobs come out with, if he lived to 150?

We do know, Duncan concludes, that Albert Einstein was very clear about his own wishes, near the end of his life: “As he lay dying of an abdominal aortic aneurysm in 1955, he refused surgery, saying: ‘It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.’”

Let’s hear it for everyone being given the opportunity to live long enough to still die elegantly!