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Opinion: Accentuating the positive

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I winced when I heard Sen. John Edwards insist the other day that his wife Elizabeth’s cancer, while incurable, was treatable, “and ‘many patients in similar circumstances have lived many years undergoing treatment.”

It was the same message doctors delivered to my brother Matthew when the colon cancer that eventually killed him staged a reappearance. As Matt relayed his doctor’s message to his family, the idea was that for him cancer was now a “chronic condition.”

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I don’t remember Matt mentioning the analogy to diabetes that figured in the Edwardses’ press conference last week. But the general idea was the same, and so was my reaction: a mixture of hope and skepticism. Professionally sensitive to PR spin, I reacted with a mental raised eyebrow when Matt mouthed the “incurable but treatable” mantra.

I’m no science journalist, but I knew enough from my reading – and the experience of other family members with cancer, including our father – that “incurable” trumped “treatable.” I also was skeptical about the notion – a cliche in most newspaper feature stories about brave people “battling cancer” – that surviving cancer was a matter of will power.

At the same time, I was grateful for Matt’s sake that he was being encouraged to accentuate the positive, although, as this wonderful piece he wrote in 2001 shows, he wasn’t naïve about the implications of “incurable” for his lease on life.

Unlike my brother, Elizabeth Edwards is a public figure, if only by marriage, so it didn’t take long for journalistic spoilsports to report that, while recurrent cancer is “treatable,” mortality statistics are not encouraging. The lead of a Washington Post story came brutally to the point: “Elizabeth Edwards’ chance of surviving five years is well below 50 percent if her experience is similar to that of other women whose breast cancer has returned within five years of its original discovery and treatment.”

I’m glad my brother wasn’t prominent enough for someone to write the same thing about him.

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