Page 116 - In Five Years

Chapter Twenty

Here is the thing no one tells you about cancer: they ease you into it. After the
initial shock, after the diagnosis and the terror, they put you on the slow
conveyor belt. They start you off nice and easy. You want some lemon water

with that chemo? You got it. Radiation? No problem, everyone does it, it’s
practically weed. We’ll serve you those chemicals with a smile. You’ll love
them, you’ll see.

Bella does indeed have ovarian cancer. They suspect stage three, which
means it has spread to nearby lymph nodes but not to surrounding organs. It’s
treatable, we’re told. There is recourse. So many times, with ovarian cancer,

there isn’t. You find it too late. It’s not too late.
I ask for the statistics, but Bella doesn’t want them. “Information like that
gets in your head,” she says. “It’ll have a higher probability of affecting the

outcome. I don’t want to know.”
“It’s numbers,” I say. “It’ll affect the outcome anyway. Hard data doesn’t

move. We should know what we’re dealing with.”
“We get to determine what we’re dealing with.”
She puts an embargo on Google, but I search anyway: 46.5 percent. That is
the survival rate of ovarian cancer patients over five years. Less than fifty-fifty.

David finds me on the tile floor of the shower.
“Fifty is good odds,” he tells me. He crouches down. He holds my hand

through the glass door. “That’s half.” But he’s a terrible liar. I know he would
never make a bet on those odds, not even drunk at a table in Vegas.