Starting with an article on the front page, and another article on page A17, of today's New York Times, both by Gina Kolata, the New York Times will publish a series of articles about "the struggle to defeat cancer." Today's articles are at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/health/policy/24cancer.html?_r=1&ref=health
(To access this article, you will need to copy this address and paste it into your browser, as I do not have the ability to create a link.)
In today's articles, Ms. Kolata documents that the death rate from cancer has barely declined since 1950. She states that patients with colorectal cancer that has metastasized-- and mine has metastasized significantly-- have a five-year survival rate of less than 10 percent. (Elsewhere, I have read that patients with my diagnosis have a mean survival rate of one to two years, with a two percent chance of surviving for five years if they are 55 years old.) The first article also quotes Dr. Leonard Saltz, the colon cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), who is treating me.
Dr. Saltz does not get drawn into statistical discussions with me about how long I may live, pointing out that no patient is a statistical average, that the data are not very good, and that the bell-shaped curve that would apply is very flat. (I might already be a data point if my cracked tooth and abscessed gum of last week had coincided with my chemotherapy-depressed white blood cell count of 1.9 of a few days earlier.)
