T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with “coffee spoons.”  I am now measuring out my life with PET/CT scans.  The oncologist told me last week that I am “disease free.”  That sounds encouraging but the unspoken words are “for now.”  Once you’ve had it, cancer is always there, lurking somewhere in your body and playing with your mind.  Now it’s a numbers game, you play the percentages.

“Doctor, will the melanoma that showed up in my lung come back?” I asked.

 “Yes.”

 “What are the odds?”

 “Not 100 percent but more than 50 percent, say, between 50 and 75 percent.”

“Where?”

“Most likely the lung again, but anywhere.  Other organs, the brain.”

“When?”

“We don’t know.”

“What do we do?”

“We watch it and do a scan every six months.” 

I would have preferred coffee spoons.

There was an option for a new drug that supposedly works on melanoma through the immune system as a preventative. You get it intravenously every three weeks for twelve weeks but it’s really not sure if it will actually stop a recurrence.  So you have to go through twelve weeks of miserable side effects like diarrhea, fever, red swollen eyes, etc. and the melanoma could come back anyway.  I don’t like those odds (and I remember chemotherapy side effects) so we’re going with the six month scans. 

Now I am reminded of another Alfred.  Remember Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman? I'm attempting to adopt his attitude.  “What, me worry?”