Sometimes, illnesses are easy to define in length. When you have a cold, for instance, you're all better once your nose stops running. When you have a broken arm, it's better once the cast comes off. But when you have cancer, are you ever really 'cured'? Is there a point where you stop being a cancer patient and go back your normal life, claiming you're 'all better now'? Is it that simple?Think about this: Some insurance companies don't consider someone cured until they've been cancer-free for 10 years. Ten years is a long time, and I doubt most survivors wait that long to celebrate their victory. This survivor, for instance, is celebrating five years of being cancer-free, and is looking forward to calling herself cured. But her insurance company won't call her cured for another five years, and a recent statistic has shown that more than half of breast cancer survivors have a recurrence more than five years after they were first diagnosed.
So is cancer a life-long weight you have to bear? Can you be definitively cured? Or is it not even worth worrying about, when there's a life to be lived and love to be shared?
1. just need to know more about cancer
Posted at 6:45AM on Jun 20th 2007 by Bulelwa Halana