When Are You "Cured"?

I went to the January Lung Cancer Support Group meeting this week. The meeting had 28 people in attendance and our speaker was Dr. Thomas Kartis, a local thoracic surgeon. Dr. Kartis’ presentation and the medical discussion that ensued made me once again realize how little I know about cancer and how much there is to learn. The discussion was wide ranging but there was one question that came up that I thought was kind of interesting. One of the members of the group asked…is there a cure for lung cancer?

Since being diagnosed, not a day has gone by that I don’t think about having cancer. It is always with me and on my mind. I am living my life today as if there is nothing wrong. I’m in a clinical trial and go for shots every six weeks. Other than that, I am not being treated for cancer any longer. Am I “cured”? Well, if I am not dead and the disease is nowhere to be found, I guess you could say I am “cured”. Will it last? That is an entirely different matter.

Until you have lived 5 years after a cancer diagnosis, you are a cancer patient. If you make it to five years, in the medical world, you are considered a “survivor”. If you die from cancer at any time you are a cancer victim. I am almost half way to becoming a rare lung cancer “survivor” since I have lived two and a half years since my diagnosis. The fact of the matter is that you are never really “cured” of cancer, even if you “survive” for a while.

If you are asymptomatic, that does not mean that there are no active cancer cells running around in your body. Dr. Kartis had a useful analogy to explain the concept of a false negative when thinking about test results: if a mouse in the room is spotted running across the floor it is positive affirmation there is a mouse in the room. We can see the mouse. But if we don’t see a mouse, does it mean there is none in the room?

We can never know if we are ever “cancer free”. My current status is NED – no evidence of disease. What they mean by that is that they can’t find it, but since I had it, we can’t say that it is no longer there. The best we can say is that there is no EVIDENCE that it is there. We don’t see the mouse any longer.

The cruel thing about cancer is that you can be easily lulled into the belief that you are cured. You are living your normal life after treatment, going along your merry way…and then…. BOOM…the other shoe drops and you find you have a nodule or tumor where there was none before. All cancer patients in remission live with the fear that cancer could turn your life upside down at any time. Still, the longer you are in remission the more hopeful you become about the future.

Speaking of the future, I have a three year lease on an Acura that ends in February. I have been thinking about what my next car should be and whether I should buy the next car or lease it. Yoko and I debated a lot of choices. Ultimately we decided to buy. Since this might be the last car I ever purchase…why not get something really memorable. What I choose is a completely impractical roadster. You can’t even get a set of golf clubs in it when the roof is down, but I love it! Now all I have to do is come up with something appropriate for a license plate…Maybe “CURED” would fit the ticket?

The lung cancer support group meets the second Tuesday of every month at the Charlotte Medical Plaza, next to Charlotte Regional Medical Center in Punta Gorda. In case you are interested the next meeting is February 9th from 2 PM.