Strong. Fighting. Surviving.

Hi, everyone. Lucky here, just filling in for Kate for a little while.

You know, some days it seems everything’s about numbers and statistics. Even in commercials, we’re always hearing that 9 out of 10 dentists like a particular gum (maybe that last one just doesn’t like gum at all), or that a soap is 99 and 44/100s percent pure, or that the orange-scented household cleaner under your sink kills 98% of germs. We see numbers all the time, and they’re sold as concrete and reliable ways to understand things. “You can’t argue with numbers,” the thinking seems to go. We can even paint pictures with numbers, and we call that art “statistics,” and we treat it reverently as a teller of truths.

The problem with that way of thinking is that numbers and statistics don’t always tell the whole story. Statistics are useful in presenting trends and the big picture, but they really do a terrible job of describing individual experiences. And that’s a problem for my friend Kate, and others who have been diagnosed with cancer: all too often, those statistics are used to try to predict what a single person’s experience will be like in an attempt to answer the natural questions that patients and their loved ones have. It’s particularly difficult with pancreatic cancer, which has some very scary numbers associated with it.

Kate has written about this before, and I thought now would be a good time to revisit that idea – that the numbers are simply numbers, each arrived at by aggregating and then flattening the unique experiences of many, many individuals. It’s such an important lesson to learn that I’m actually going to suggest a short additional reading – an article which has been called “the wisest, most humane thing ever written about cancer and statistics.”

The reading is a short article written by the scientist and author Stephen Jay Gould upon his diagnosis with abdominal mesothelioma, a form of cancer with a median survival rate of eight months. Upon encountering this number, Gould took it upon himself to translate into layperson’s terms the very meaning of median, and infused the term with hope instead of looming dread.

If you do nothing else today, go read “The Median is NOT the Message,” by Stephen Jay Gould. It’s illuminating, it’s inspiring, and it’s hopeful.

[Gould passed away in 2002, twenty years after his diagnosis]