Brain cancer is...
...repping the tail.
Birthday Month Day Eight is also Darrell's 42-month cancerversary. That's 3 1/2 years, Team D. Andi is unexpectedly emotional about it. I can't talk or text about it without crying. We didn't have much hope that Darrell would be proudly owning his castle (above) at 3 1/2 years post diagnosis.
Why not? Because we can't ignore numbers.
Briefly, this picture (below) of the normal curve depicts the probability of randomly distributed events happening. The higher the point in the curve, the higher the probability of something happening.
The median survival of GBM is 15 months. (If you had to guess someone's survival, based on what's happened to other people, you'd guess that a newly diagnosed person would have 15 months left on earth.)
When Hallie and Ruth visited us in the hospital at Darrell's diagnosis, Ruth said, "the tails in a distribution are long."
What she meant was that very few people survive for a long time with GBM...but somebody does. Above you see the chances of Darrell surviving 42 months are low...Waaay out at the tail.
What Ruth said was very helpful, because she didn't say, "Ignore the numbers!" (which is not in our nature), but that Darrell might survive longer than average, even given statistical probabilities.
Today when we texted the good news to Hallie and Ruth, Hallie said, "Way to rep the tail, Darrell!" (Rep = represent.)
News on Birthday Month Day Eight couldn't be much better....except to say we're looking forward to Brady, Linda, Bennett, and Christian joining us for a couple days in the mountains.
Keep on repping the tail, Darrell!
