Seriously Now

So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom. PS. 90:12

The doctor stonewalls at making a prediction for how long I will survive. Likewise, I dodge at giving an answer to friends and family, in large part because I don't know. Then there are so many variables. I would hate to tell someone that I was going to live for five more years and then still be going strong at seven, and them think I had lied to them, or for some, broken a promise. Likewise if I told them 20 years, and then died from the cancer after three.

From the outset, we have declared our lives are fully in the hands of an omnipotent and loving Heavenly Father, who could heal me of the cancer by whatever means He chooses, could prolong my life for however many years He chooses, or could take me home next week with a bad case of the sniffles. It is all in His hands.

From a human perspective, however, attached is one helpful piece of information that Carol and I obtained from the myeloma conference that we attended two weekends ago. It is a chart that tracks overall survival of myeloma patients by decade, from the time of their diagnosis. Here are some facts or conclusions that can be drawn from the chart:

1. There has always been a small percentage of myeloma patients, about 10%, who have made it past 10 years beyond diagnosis, and seem to go on indefinitely with this as a chronic condition. These are the outlier data points, but there seem to be quite a few of them. At the conference, one of our speakers was a seemingly healthy man who had been in treatment for 19 years, and a report was given of a person who had been a patient for 31 years. Geraldine Ferraro has been a myeloma patient since 1998, 11 years.
2. The average survival period for a myeloma patient over the past decade, however, is only about 4.5 years after diagnosis. Again from the human perspective, it reasonable to assume that I would do better than average because that number obviously includes all myeloma patients - those diagnosed in late stages of the disease, those who are elderly, those who die from other causes / complications, etc. I was diagnosed very early in the disease before it had attacked my skeletal frame or any organs of my body, at a relatively young age, and in otherwise excellent health.
3. That average 4.5 year survival period over the past decade is a vast improvement over the 2.5 years after diagnosis for the preceding decade. This means, among other things, that the treatments are getting better. The longer a patient can survive, the greater his chances of overall survival due to new drugs and therapies being developed.

Conclusion: We don't know. Review the chart and make your own conclusions if you like. I was diagnosed in September 2007, almost two years ago. My plan is to substantially beat the average and hopefully become an outlier data point, but leave it all in God's hands and not waste a single day in the meantime.