I wish to applaud you for your positive attitude and telling your story here. Good news is always welcome. I am pleased that, so far, you have had a positive outcome.

I spend a great deal of time lecturing on cancer programs with people whose knowledge is considered cutting edge, and armed with that information, (and having many of them on our science advisory board) we attempt to put out the best information possible. As you state, the web is a place where too often incorrect information is more abundant than that which is correct. In that light, what you have found and quoted here is not 100% accurate. You should check with the CDC SEER database, or the national cancer registry, and you will find that this disease is a killer way more than 25% of the time. (Perhaps you are referring to your particular staging which is on the extremely early end of things, making your survival numbers better statistically.) Please also remember that we have had people here posting for years, some of whom made all their follow up appointments diligently, and when their recurrence was discovered, it ran like wildfire, and metastasized rapidly to places where it finally took their lives. There are certainly no guarantees in all of this, and therein lies the sword that we all live under as the previous post alludes to. It is always an advantage to catch things early, but sometimes the recurrence is visually occult, the doctors who are not infallible miss the beginnings of it, or it is just a particularly rapid spreading event. We can never state things as an absolute, there are just to many variables.

You were very lucky to have your disease found at such an early stage, most people who come to this disease do not. Therein lies why the survival (let alone the extreme morbidity of the treatments) numbers can be quite dismal. With 2/3rds of people being initially diagnosed with a stage 3 or 4 killer, the SEER numbers for survival in those people are far from what yours were. When you combine those high stage discovery people (even with no collateral illness or frailty) with the one third that has an earlier stage diagnosis, you find what pushes the death rate percentages up. Odds of recurrence vary on etiology and staging, and broad generalizations such as you have made are not accurate. Viral eitiologies have better survival than tobacco causes, early stages better survival than late. People can make the general statements, though they are not a guarantee. Within all this there is no hard rule that you can hang your hat on. We has seen early stage patients lose their battles, and late stage 4, bilaterally metastasized patients such as myself, still be around a decade later. Cancer is definitely not a world of absolutes.

Please do not take any of these comments in any negative manner, but just a desire to put the correct information out there. We all hope that your doctor's opinion of your future is true, and you have a long lifetime of health ahead of you.

I also am a big fan of Armstrong's and if you read the LAF's LiveStrong: Stories of Survival book, you will see my story in it, and portions of it exist on the LAF website as well. I have also been a member of the Lance Armstrong Foundation's grant review committee.