cancer

No, not mine. This time I'm writing about my mother-in-law.

Natasha got a call last night from her mother, who was at the hospital receiving a chemo treatment. She had noticed some odd lumps on her neck and wisely went to the doctor. To make a long story short, the diagnosis is that she has small-cell carcinoma in her lymph nodes.

You may remember that once I got over the initial impact of hearing the C-word in connection with my own health that I lost no time in cracking jokes about it. I'm not doing that here because, quite frankly, the prognosis is not good, judging by what Natasha's been able to find out about this particular kind of cancer. They caught it early, which is a definite advantage in treating it, but this is an agressive cancer. The two-year survival rate for women diagnosed at this stage is about 20 percent, from what Natasha can tell; in other words, there is about a one in five chance that her mom will be alive in three years.

Natasha is taking it about as well as you could expect, all things considered, but she is fairly upset. I spent a while this evening, just holding her. Her mother didn't provided much information beyond the diagnosis and that she was on chemo; Natasha has had to deduce from that the carcinoma has spread to her lymph nodes from her lungs. (Google the phrase "small cell carcinoma," and I think you'll agree that's a reasonable deduction.) In Natasha's words, "She doesn't have the guts to tell people that her cigarettes have finally killed her."

I suspect there's a lot of wisdom in that statement; i.e., that Natasha's mother is afraid. She's in her mid-50s, and while I don't think she expected to live into her 90s or even her 80s, I don't think she expected the real possibility that she might die before she turns 60.

Cancer sucks.