The three final, stressful years of Joanne’s earthly life often seemed to me like walking along the razor’s edge of a narrow Himalayan path with precipitous drop-offs on either side.
It felt wise to look only straight ahead, taking one step at a time, and not be diverted by the dreadful possibilities of avalanches on the right or the left.
She died on May 31, 1991, but beginning in 1988 I had spent countless hours in the library of the MSU College of Human Medicine reading every book and magazine article about the causes, diagnosis and treatment of colorectal cancer.
Computers were only beginning to be introduced at the university, and the main research tool was still hard copy - books and journal articles. All the predictions for the outcomes for treatment gave a prognosis of three years as the most probable outcome, with only a 26% probability of recovery.
I had hoped against hope to have Joanne reverse these probabilities for her cancer, but it was almost exactly three years from the time of her first cancer diagnosis to her demise.
Nowadays (2021), with early detection, the American Cancer Society says the probabilities for recovery from colorectal cancer are almost totally reversed…
