The land of NED - two different journeys

Kate Jackson of the Pointy Universe gives her take on Breast Cancer Awareness month for the Patriot Ledger.

One story I'd like to give Kate is one personal to me. There is one woman on my team at work that was diagnosed with BC in 2004-2005. She is in her late 50s and she went through the same thing. She didn't return to work for two years while she received treatments for breast cancer, but when she did return, it was certainly triumphant. I don't know the staging or extent - none of my business - but she was thrilled to return.

Compared to my father, who died from non-smoking related metastatic lung cancer in 2005, her return gave me hope. Cancer is a devastating diagnosis, but not the end of the world. If detected early enough, the land of NED is reachable (not exactly easy - you have to go through the gauntlet of chemo and radiation first - and that cancer is like the bad guy in The Warriors clinking his bottles and taunting them - "Warriors...come out and play-ay!").

My dad's cancer was detected because he had a nagging leg pain and the bone in his thigh snapped (femur). The day they did a nuclear bone scan did they discover the 3cm tumor in his lung that had metastized to his leg. Instant Stage IV - probably the toughest diagnosis one could get. Not an immediate death sentence, either, as we had him go through six regimens of chemo (Taxol and Cisplatin) and later on, radiation for his brain cancer to follow.

We too thought that a miracle would occur. We had a bottle of inexpensive champagne ready when the doctors would announce he was in that land of NED. Several times, I hoped for a miracle - that not only the tumor in his lung would be eradicated, he'd make a total recovery.

The land of NED, however, had a cruel deviation. When he died on November 22, he was certainly out of the land of constant pain, heavy-duty opiates, and hallucinations, and into a dry martini handed out by St. Peter himself. (Groucho Marx joke spoken by Bugs Bunny.) The day of his funeral, we did indeed drink that champagne we saved as a celebration, not as a goodbye.

To this day, I certainly miss my father. But I never mourned him - maybe cried a little bit, but never sat there and bemoaned his loss. That's because he never would have wanted pity or sadness. He reminds us that nothing is forever, and to make the best of what we have. You have to continue with your lives, even if there are times of loneliness and despair.

We love to use the word "sustainable" as if it were a magic wand, but human lives are impossible to sustain much beyond one's life expectancy. Sure, there are outliers - Willard Scott's bread and butter was announcing centarian's birthdays - but sometimes there are things we can't control, and giving up that control is never easy.

To say that cancer is impossible to beat, however, lies in how willing we are to find its cure. Once it is, all those people, including those with lung cancer, will automatically shift into the land of NED.