Published: March 25, 2007 12:10 am            

Putting cancer in its place

As Elizabeth Edwards stood before the world Thursday and announced her breast cancer had recurred and metastasized to her bones, she represented millions of Americans whose lives have been turned upside down by cancer.

For the length of that press conference she was not the wife of a presidential candidate, she was a woman staring fear in the face and smiling.

Cancer is the word none of us want to hear coming out of our doctor’s mouth. It is a word that changes lives. It is a disease that ends lives.

But cancer doesn’t always win. The world is filled with people who have gone toe to toe with cancer and survived.

For people with the type of cancer Elizabeth Edwards is battling, however, the statistics are not favorable. Experts say she has a 20 to 25 percent chance of surviving five years.



But she isn’t planning to spend her remaining time dying, but living. Thus she and her husband decided he should continue his second quest for the White House.

As she stood beside her husband on Thursday, putting her life and her illness on public display, she spoke calmly, her face masking what must have been going on inside her.

“Courage,” former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said, “is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death.”

And why wouldn’t she be scared? She has three children, two of whom are 8 and 6. She faces the reality most of her children’s lives will be spent without her.

But she didn’t show it, and that is true courage.

Elizabeth Edwards is not alone, however. She is just one of thousands of Americans living with breast cancer. In 2006 alone, there were an estimated 212,920 women, and 1,720 men, diagnosed with breast cancer. Breast cancer kills nearly 41,000 women and nearly 500 men per year in this country.

Most of them don’t give press conferences, don’t have their condition analyzed on national television, don’t receive words of support and encouragement from politicians of both parties, as well as White House spokesman Tony Snow, himself a cancer survivor. The vast majority deal with their illness supported only by their families, friends and medical team.

Their day-to-day struggles with their disease and the havoc it wreaks on their lives are played out in private. But their courage is no less great than that of Elizabeth Edwards.

Cancer is a terrible disease, an insidious killer, sapping life slowly or with naked aggression, or lying dormant for years before suddenly appearing in another spot.

Elizabeth Edwards has made it clear there is no room in her life for death. She will live with her cancer the best she can, taking treatments to beat it back, to keep it at bay, until it exacts its final toll.

Statistics are merely numbers, cold representations of facts and trends. But human beings don’t always fit into neat statistical packages, thus Elizabeth Edwards has every right to believe she will outlive the predictions.

Perhaps her public battle with breast cancer will prove beneficial for people all over America. It could encourage women, and men alike, to get regular breast exams. It also could help bring in more money for cancer research.

Elizabeth Edwards might serve as a role model for those living with cancer, as well as their families, providing an example of a woman going on with her life, putting cancer in its place.



Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle.