Because it’s a sneaky disease.
The cancerous cells multiply under your skin while you do not have the faintest idea what is going on.
You feel perfect, you eat perfect, you exercise, you are having the time of your life — and still the cells keep multiplying, even traveling around your body. And still you don’t feel a thing.
And then you feel a tiny lump, feeling healthy as a fish, so you are not alarmed. And why would you, since you feel really good ? (And there are so many innocent conditions which cause lumps.)
The thing is: at that precise moment, you could feel and even be relatively healthy, if your condition would be frozen, and not allowed to proceed its course.
At the precise moment of your cancer diagnosis, you still could be perfectly fine with no harm done. If only the cancer was frozen.
But it is not.
And that is why a stage 4 diagnosis of some cancers (such as breast cancer), can (and almost certainly will) literally hand you a death sentence, while at the moment of first symptoms and eventual diagnosis, you are actually still fine. If only it was frozen.
Compare it to the following situation: if you fall from a 50-meter-high bridge, then in any stage before you touch the ground, you will be a perfectly healthy person. But if the fall proceeds, you will almost certainly die.
And that is how the doctor sees it: he or she knows how the cancer will proceed, and although you are still fine, you won’t be in due course when you will fall closer and closer to the ground.
That must have happened when Nadine was diagnosed.
It started with a lump, the diagnosis was metastasized breast cancer to the lymph nodes and bones — but still, only a tiny lump. At the moment of diagnosis, the lump was the only symptom, so she was still falling (but the fall had already begun quite a while ago), and in some sense pretty healthy.
When I saw her for the last time, she was dangerously close to the ground. She looked very sick, she was very sick, and whatever they had tried, it was too late now. And she knew it.
You could see it in her every move — and I knew these moves all too well, because she once had been my wife — that life had virtually left her, and that she was turning into a ghost. The empty eyes told the entire story.
And two months later she finally touched the ground, and evaporated.
In thin air.
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