Ant or Grasshopper

Last night was fight club.* I don't think I'm violating the terms of the group to report that I heard about a few people who were diagnosed with colon cancer, wound up on the same oral --

annnnd at this point my brain stops working and I cannot for the life of me remember the word...

cancer...

oncology...

CHEMOTHERAPY! Chemotherapy is the word I'm looking for...

(weird, and a little bit alarming)

-- the same oral chemotherapy I'm taking, and are now NED. (NED = No Evidence of Disease. Even cancer has its TLAs.**) This obviously leads to the immediate conclusion: if they can do it then so can I. Maybe. I don't know anything about how far their disease had progressed, and I don't know their full treatment histories. Maybe they were on infusions long enough to eradicate the tumors and then moved to Xeloda as a way to just keep the cancer from coming back, or maybe, like me, they started on oral chemo while the tumors were still present. I don't know.

So now I'm in this weird situation, where the words are clearly (and legitimately) designed to engender hope, but it's not at all clear if the hope is warranted. Could be it is; could be it's not. 

And then the thinking gets really strange. Is hope actually a good thing or a bad thing? I've been making decisions based on the assumption that the life expectancy information I was given when all this started -- i.e., thirty month median survival -- was accurate. I've turned off my retirement contributions, stopped worrying about what will happen in one year, five years, or ten years, and have taken to just focusing on the current quarter.

In short, I'm an ant who's become a grasshopper. But the detail the tale of the ant and the grasshopper omits is that (according to a quick Google search) while an adult ant can live for fifteen years an adult grasshopper has a lifespan of just thirty days. 

Which makes the story of the ant and the grasshopper sort of nuts. The ant should've minded its own business. Why should the grasshopper do anything but have fun if it's only got thirty days to live? 

But now if the grasshopper suddenly gets a ten or twenty year extension to his lifespan, all that fun may come back to bite him.

It's a bit of dilemma: act like an ant at the risk that you'll save and plan for a future that never happens, or act like a grasshopper at the risk that you'll outlive your limited stored resources. 

I'd say it's a tough call, but it really isn't -- at least it isn't until you suddenly have a reason to wonder.


* For those who don't recall, my name for the colon cancer support group.
** Three Letter Acronyms.