I hadn’t ever considered (prior to today) that doctors have an important commonality with weathermen: neither can give an accurate forecast.
Consider: weathermen are very often wrong with their predictions. Likewise, my mother’s doctor was unwilling to answer the question, “How long do I have to live?” with any specificity. It seems that often, their predictions are also incorrect… and he’s the first one to admit it.
About the best he could give was survival percentages for certain time ranges, i.e.: less than 10% survive for five years… or even for one year. Conversely, mom could also be here with us for another 2 or 3 years.
To me, it sounds just like a 30% chance of rain, and a 30% chance of sun, forecast for the same day.
Physicians and Weathermen
Leave a Reply
Read Next
When we arrived in New Hampshire in early June, one of the first sounds I heard was the inimitable arguing of hummingbirds. I can hardly tell you how happy I was to find them here, since they’re one of my …
The Senate is planning to vote this evening on a slightly modified version of Monday’s defeated bail-out bill. They’ve added a couple of things. The bill adds new provisions – including raising the FDIC insurance cap to $250,000 from $100,000 …
Via memeorandum this morning, I see that a “photo” of Sarah Palin in a bikini has surfaced. Or not. But that’s not going to keep people from pushing it out there. One would think that a little common sense would …
(Continuing from “The French Scout”) We’d gone into a loop: the family was in the U.S. for hundreds of years…. the name was DeRock…. they were in New York, always…. prior to 1900, they weren’t there. I had both too …
I had the same experience with my mom. There are just so many variables, depending on what’s wrong. With my mom (kidney cancer) she ended up not being able to tolerate the treatment at all and was gone within a year. Your mom seems to be pretty tough though. Keep us posted. She’s in my prayers.
I think my mom’s doc wished he had been a little more weatherman-like. He was quite positive they had gotten her cancer, but didn’t realize that it might also spread via another path – so that 10 months later, all of a sudden it was back – and to the point they told her they couldn’t “make it go away”.
Enjoy the time you have left with her, and we will also keep your family in our thoughts and prayers.
~EdT.