Crystal Balls, Chicken Bones and Miss Cleo

Prognosis - a prediction of the course of a disease

"What is Mike's prognosis?" I've been asked this question quite a few times in the last week. Almost exclusively by someone who doesn't know either of us very well. The answer has been the same each time, "I don't know?"

The question puzzles me and I don't know because, in all the medical visits he's had these past few months that question has never come up. Mike hasn't asked it. I haven't asked it. No doctor has volunteered it and no statistical number has been assigned to his cancer. All I know is that nobody has said the "T" word - terminal - so to me that means a full recovery. That's what we are planning anyhow. A full recovery.

I am not a big believer in statistics. People beat them all the time. Statistics can be manipulated to support any case, argument or outcome. They aren't concrete and they certainly are, without any certainty, unable to predict the future. So, what is a doctor doing when he is prognosticating? Does that prognosis carry any more weight than say, what a palm reader does with your hand in hers? What about tea leaves, horoscopes or casting chicken bones? Are these any more sure? Why is it that because a man goes through a million hours of education at an Ivy league school his prediction of the future carries more weight than say Miss Cleo? Really, can any of us foresee the future?

Not!

All we have is now. The past is gone. The future is always the next breath away and never here. We can only play those painful mind games with the future. The kind I was playing tonight in bed. The kind that is robbing me of sleep. The "bad head" game that has me here blogging some sense into myself instead of lying with my arm across Mike's chest sleeping. We all have these times, it's a sad part of our human condition.

Tich Nat Han says: "The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers."

Be present my friends and family. Enjoy what you have in front of you each and every moment. Enjoy your flowers.

Peace and sweet dreams,
Karen