I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange

Yorkie, don't worry, it's a futile enterprise anyway because the only thing that matters is what actually occurs - not what could occur. IMO, the chances for each of us as individuals are 50-50. We either recur or we don't.

Some  seriously sophisticated analysis of the future may tell us what our individual risks are better (using epigenetics, etc....). That knowhow isn't there yet - not by a long shot. But for now, every day that it didn't happen, you didn't know it happeed, or it happened but you can still live is a day in your favor.

Athena - I don't think when 80 slots are up your odds go up.  I always remember this example in statistics.....Let's Make a Deal - 3 doors.  You pick Door 1 for the Big Prize.  Your odds of getting the Big Prize is 33.3%.  Then they reveal door Door 3 and it's a dinner date with Mitt Romney.  Some would think you now have a 50% chance of winning the Big Prize because only two doors remain unopened, one with the Big Prize, but it actually remains at 33.3%.

Never understood it, but I distinctly remember this from biostats.

Beesie – you are more than welcome to post in this thread, but you do seem to take offense when others of us who post here do not agree with you, and that is too bad.  Your comments are not rude, but neither have been the rebuttals to your comments.  Surely, if you have the right to disagree with most of the posters on this thread (and you absolutely do have that right) we also have the right to disagree with you, but it seemed to me (and I absolutely could be incorrect) that you were offended by the disagreement of others.  I’ve enjoyed your posts elsewhere and though I didn’t “enjoy” your posts here, I do see you as a person who is both thoughtful and intelligent.

Anyway, I do disagree with you.  Normally I just don’t get into disagreements on BCO, because I don’t come here for that.  I’ve got plenty of fodder for disagreements other places in my life, but I’m afraid that because of where you chose to post, that I’m going to have to post in return.

American politics is not the same as politics elsewhere.  I’m not Canadian and do not profess to know diddly about Canadian politics, as I don’t.  You folks don’t smear your campaigns over the rest of the world as we do, but one of the centerpieces of politics in the U.S. is lack of respect.  It may not make any sense to you, but Presidents (and Presidential candidates) do not get respect.  The OFFICE gets respect.  What you say about Romney is correct.  He doesn’t smoke or drink.  He has had a very long, assumedly loyal marriage and he apparently still loves his wife.  (I use those assumption words, because no one ever truly knows what goes on behind closed doors.)  He has been a bishop in his church and gives a lot of his income to that church.  He became the “lying devil” that he is portrayed to be simply because he has been shown to be a bald-faced liar on many occasions.  He’s not a devil, but he is a liar.  He says whatever he thinks is needed to say to the audience that is in front of him without any apparent thought that he said the exact opposite to an earlier audience.  I don’t like that in a person.  It will definitely help a person in many walks of life, but it doesn’t change the fact that the person who does it is lying at least some of the time. 

What you say about “more and more people come out publicly to say they voted for Obama in 2008 but will not be voting for him in 2012” is, of course, true.  What does that really mean, though?  It doesn’t mean that he “failed” as most people who say that (or quote that) seem to intimate.  It means nothing, in reality.  If I said (for example) that I voted for him in 2008 but wouldn’t this year it would mean that I was angry that he didn’t stand up to the Republicans more – yet, in your opinion, he was too mean and didn’t sit down with them enough.  In other words, those who choose not to vote, or choose to vote for a different candidate this year are not a block of people who are making that choice for any cogent easily articulated reason.  There are also people who voted for McCain in 2008 who will be voting for Obama in 2012, but you don’t hear as much about them.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion that Romney would be a better leader than Obama.  In my opinion, he would not.   I won’t get into the whys and wherefores of that, as it has been well articulated by others.  If Romney should be elected, he will be my President, he will not be your President, and the things that he has stated he wants to change will not affect your life.  They will affect mine.

Edited to add that I didn't realize you had just posted when I posted this, as I had been out at a meeting and realized I hadn't submitted it earlier in the day.....

Beesie, you haven't missed anything - in a way. That is how misleading statistics can be. Indeed, when 25 women out of 100 were destined to die, your chance of being in that group at the start is one in four. At ten years, with 20 women having recurred, your chance is just 1 in 16. Statistically, then, as you point out, your chance or recurring is smaller.

BUT you are more likely to recur in another sense.

Let's look at it this way. Let's say there are 100 women with breast cancer standing. In 20 years, there will only be 75. Let's pretend, to make this simple, that each of the 25 women who will recur and die will fall ill at separate times - let's say, several months apart from each other.

Now let's start the clock ticking and make this a game of chance. We are going to assemble the 100 women with breast cancer in a room. At the start, we each have a 1 in 99 chance of being the first to die. Month six comes along, one woman dies. If you are alive, you now have a 1 in 98 chance of dying - meaning, a greater chance. Month 12 comes along. Another woman is dead. Now your chances have gone up to 1 in 97. By the time years go by and, say, twenty women are dead, your chances of dying whenever the next fatality occurs is one in 80. So as the group gets smaller, your number is that much closer to being chosen. 

Statistics are some of the most diabolically misleading little ghouls out there, and too many have made mincemeat of them in today's medicine. There is a superb statistician from Memorial Sloan-Kettering - Andrew Vickers, I think his name is, who writes wonderfully funny stories on the folly of statistics and how you can manipulate them.

I learned to take statistics with a grain of salt when I got diagnosed. On the even of my dx, the NCI's calculator said I had a 0.8 percent chance of getting bc when I did. Given that I seemed to have beaten rather incredible odds, there is nothing on earth that should make me so damned confident that I will always be in the majority.  

Most good docs take statistics with a grain of salt - especially for more advanced cases, where less is known and outliers are more common.

notself, you are correct about the history of American politics. The difference is that news is instanteous and available to everyone now, whereas there used to be more isolation... and with the darned 24/7 news cycle it makes it seem much worse.

Athena, in your example, no one ever had the odds of 1 in 100, even when all 100 were standing.  One person might be next to recur or the first to die but in all, 25 people are going to have a recurrence so from the minute everyone entered the room, the odds were 25 in 100, never 1 in 100. The stats have nothing to do with who will be next; that's just not what they measure.  So the stats can't be wrong or misleading about something that they were never meant to imply or suggest. 

Statistics can tell us what will happen to the group of 100 that we are standing with.  Statistics cannot however ever tell us what will happen to any one individual.  It's when we try to use the statistics for the group to tell us what will happen to the individual that we tend to run into trouble. 

gardengumby, I've been told that I shouldn't be posting here.  I've been told that I'm lecturing, scolding, wagging my finger. I've been told that I'm rude. I've been told that I'm hurting people. I've been told that I've been talking trash. Some people have kindly welcomed my comments and have respectfully responded. Others have been less generous. So I guess I don't agree with you that the rebuttals have not been rude. Some have been. I have tried to ignore those posts and not respond in kind. If you are telling me that I haven't been completely successful in that regard and I've come across as being offended, then I apologize because it certainly was not my intent and it's actually not how I feel at all. No offense taken at all, even with those less than generous comments.

I remember now why I stopped posting on this thread some time ago.  It's exhausting. 

Athena - even if I agreed with your manipulation of a statistic as other's in your sample die off, which I don't, I disagree that the precision of the overall statistics we commonly see (and they are given for a certain period of time, 5, 10, 20 years).  As they say, BC is 20 different diseases, and until they stratify for that, and even further down from that, e.g. lifestyle choices, age of dx, other diseases, BMI, etc. none of the members of the cohort are even comparable.  And certainly not by saying since Mary died, I now have a x% better chance of living til year 10.

I have studied some BC subtype statistics, but even those lump various stages, tumor sizes, and nodal involvement, grade,  totally diluting the meaning of any outcomes...and again, they don't even begin to address personal matters such as lifestyle. 

The closest attempt I've seen for subdividing the population is Oncoscore, though if I remember correctly, their cohort was not that big given the range of recurrence scores and outcomes they were predicting for.  They do give a confidence interval for their outcomes, but they are pretty darn wide.

Kam, I totally agree - I'm not saying I stand by any of those methods to acertain my risk or anybody else's. I am actually showing in rather dark humor how the stats game can be played backwards and forwards.

 I have zero respect for statistics in bc for that reason. We know there are many differences, but there exist even more than we can't account for. It may be that I had an easily foreseeable case of bc coming at me in my life - if only science had known what to look for.

The oncotype test itself is too new for us to know how prognostic it is. I have very limited respect for Adjuvant! et. al. although I have used them because we all live off hope (or despair, as the case may be). Then there is the likelihood that DCIS will become IDC (that may differ enormously by individual), and the HUGE difference in outcomes for metastatic patients - outcomes that are probably further skewed by the fact that discovery happens at diverse points for that group.

I wonder if the time will come when cancer won't be classified by the part of the body where it began but by biomarkers.

Well, I guess rudeness is in the eye of the beholder   In all honesty, I felt you were rude in your posts, but really didn't care, because it was a part of your opinion - if you couldn't phrase it the way you needed to, then you couldn't actually voice that opinion it accurately..    Let's face it, posting anywhere about a topic that involves strong feelings can be exhausting because most people want their voice heard, but also don't want to insult people who feel differently. 

This thread has been a bit of a safe haven for many of us who IRL do not have many places where we can open up and voice the political viewpoints we have - sometimes at the expense of opposing viewpoints.  I cannot (for example) talk politics at work as there are very stringent rules in place about it.  Most of my neighbors are not of the same political persuasion as I, so unless I want to argue (which I don't) I cannot really talk politics with them.  This has also been a haven at BCO, as we (both conservative and liberal) have adopted a bit of a hands-off policy on our respective threads in order to reduce anger and nastiness.  So the fact that you posted against Obama, set a few teeth on edge.

Please don't take offense, or feel that I'm asking you not to post, as I'm not, but I do want to state that this thread is a bit of a lifeline for me, so I have a need to defend it.  I deeply value the other women who post on this thread and feel that I have found some kindred spirits.  I will take it upon myself to apologize for the fact that you have felt unwelcome for posting divergent opinions, but I hope that you do understand that sometimes well - to be honest - ya just don't wanna be that nice reasonable person you have to be in the rest of your life.  You want to be unreasonable and want everyone else to make the allowances that you are normally expected to make.  I don't know if I made myself clear, I hope so, but right now I'm going to stop other than to say that I like you and do hope that you continue to post here, and hope that I haven't offended anyone.

cuz it's your life, not their's.  Otherwise they'd go ' my God, that a 20 to 40% of DYING!!!! ' 

Sometimes I just get really sick and tired of people.....

BTW - did you get your port removed?

and another BTW - I for some unknown masochistic reason was reading last night and realized that I had the wrong date in my head for my diagnosis.  10-20 (really soon) was the date of my bad mammogram that started me on the path.  10-28 (also really soon, but a few more days out) was the actual date of my diagnosis.  I'm not really sure which is the worse date, but I suppose the 28th.  Before that I kept hoping they'd find out I was really OK....

My very scientific assessment of my situation:

Dunno!

Lassie, I'm with you. Either I will recur or I won't. I had less than a 5% chance of recurrence the first time, but I recurred. I have an infinitesmal chance of recurring again, after the bmx and ooph, but it isn't zero. I do it in what I call "granny math" - I have a 50% chance of recurring or not - either I will or I won't. Again. Completely statistically inaccurate, but it is my truth. It wasn't supposed to come back, but it did. It isn't supposed to come back again, but it could. It just is.



Makes my economist husband crazy (yes, he is a cop and an economist) for me to say that, but it works in my world.



L

Now we know why Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney wouldn’t go on the “high risk” The View today. The Mitt Romney dubbed “sharp-tongued” Whoopi Goldberg asked a question that was super hard as part of the show’s “Red, White and View” series. Goldberg asked the wife of the man who keeps suggesting that we need to go to another war and he wouldn’t bring the troops home from Afghanistan if the reason Mitt Romney never served in the military was due to their religion.

Whoopi Goldberg: What I read about your husband, what I read, and maybe you can correct this, is that the reason that he didn’t serve in Vietnam was because it was against the religion.

Ann Romney: He was serving his mission. (Explaining that none of her sons have served in the military) My five sons have also served (on) missions. We find different ways of serving… I sent them away boys and they came back men.

Whoopi Goldberg: So when you’re facing these mothers whose children have not come back, how will you explain to them that your sons haven’t gone?

Ann Romney: I think it’s the hardest thing that a president will probably do.

Ann Romney continued by claiming that Mitt “went to every funeral” when he was governor, which seems to be stretching the odds, especially since he was out of the state for 400 plus days in the last two years of his only term, but accuracy is not a Romney trait. This is the man who forgot to mention the troops in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, and who later said you don’t go through a laundry list when giving a speech, you talk about the things that are important.

So this woman actually thinks that going to France to "serve" , like Rmoney did during the Vietnam War, is the same as going to war!!  Is she for FUC***G real!!  Can you imagine what the Tealiban would say if FLOTUS said this???

Where is the Tealiban saying how disrespectful this is to actual men and women who have and are serving???  It is incredible how clueless this family is.