Heatherina

Information

My heart feels heavy today. My head is filled with numbers. Swimming with statistics. A couple of old sayings cross my mind… curiosity killed the cat, ignorance is bliss. But I always have to know. Good or bad, I have to know everything. I crave every detail. And then my head is heavy with information I wish I didn’t know. But not knowing doesn’t make it go away. It doesn’t change anything. So, in the end, I think I’d rather know as much as I can. Because in the end, I think of another saying… knowledge is power.

I live a life devoted to cancer. I spend my days and nights fighting it in more than one way. As much as I can I work, devoting myself to an organization dedicated to ovarian cancer. And when I’m not working I’m battling to kill the cancer cells that are feeding off of me; the little leeches that are trying to steal my health, my youth, my life. But why? Why does it have to be this way? Why are there hundreds of thousands of organizations dedicated to cancer? Millions of people spend their lives in organizations similar to mine, in jobs similar to mine; each one working toward a similar goal: the battle against a specific cancer.

I was doing work on facebook today. It’s a program that I’m young enough to understand, but just old enough to be confused by. What I mean is, someone in college right now who spends hours on the computer, knows all the ins and outs and new applications. And although I know the basics, I’ve been away from a job that revolved around computers long enough that I lost that seemingly innate sense of what’s new and how it works. So, I do research. I spend hours looking at other people’s pages and figuring out how to do new things. And at the back of my mind is always OCRF. It always is there whenever I hear of a new form of media or communication, because awareness is such an important part of our mission. The more ways to get our message out, the better. So in the time I spend looking at groups and causes and applications and pieces of flair, I always look for what is already there that is somehow related to ovarian cancer.

Maybe I should take a minute to back up here and explain that OCRF stands for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund, which is where I work. I started working there just 2 months before I started my own battle with colon cancer. So, I really do spend my days fighting cancer, in more than one way.

But back to facebook…During my searches for ovarian cancer, I find that there are many related pre-existing pages, groups, pieces of flair, etc. Whether they are large groups I have heard of and know we partner with, smaller community groups, or individual pages; the presence may not be overwhelming, but it is there. So, back to my original question…why? Why does there need to be more than one organization devoted to ovarian cancer? Why do there have to be multiple research organizations and multiple non-profits working to raise money for each individual cancer? And it’s because cancer is a part of everyone’s life, whether its presence is as obvious as is it is my life or not. Someday, every person will be affected by cancer.

I went to the American Cancer Society website in search of statistics. It was purely out of curiosity and mainly for me, because I already know the stats for ovarian cancer. And the stats are scary. Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the US, exceeded only by heart disease. In the US, cancer accounts for 1 of every 4 deaths. This year, about 565,650 Americans are expected to die of cancer. That equals more than 1,500 people a day! 1 in 3 females in the US will develop a type of cancer at some point in their life. About 1,437,180 new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in 2008. Lung cancer is the most common and accounts for the most deaths, 29%. In 2008, 215,020 new cases of lung cancer are expected to be diagnosed. Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women and the number 2 cause of all cancer death. An estimated 182,460 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to occur among women in 2008; about 1,990 new cases are expected in men. Ovarian cancer accounts for 3% of cancers among women with 21,650 new cases expected to be diagnosed.

As far as colon cancer goes, an estimated 108,070 cases of colon cancer are expected to occur in 2008. Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in both men and women. However, the probability of a woman age 0-39 developing invasive colon cancer is 1 in 1,394. But here I am, 24, beating the odds and adding my own little hash mark to the census. Females in general from birth to death have a 1 in 19 chance of developing colon cancer. Breast cancer is 1 in 8. Lung is 1 in 16.

So, there it is. I got all the answers I was looking for. But I wish they were different. It just makes me glad that maybe I can make some small difference. But it is so sobering and humbling to see such numbers. Especially when you think that each number is a person. Each tally mark is someone’s daughter or sister, friend, mother, husband, partner, roommate, cousin, etc. One of them is me. I am part of the statistics. Just another number, one of the millions, making cancer the center of their world.

Think about it.