I received an e-mail message today from
Survivorship Celebration celebrationevents@mskcc.org
The message read:
Join us for MSK's Survivorship Celebration!
You’re invited to Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Survivorship Celebration.
Co-star of TLC's Little Couple, neonatologist, and cancer survivor, Dr. Jennifer Arnold, will deliver the evening’s keynote speech. Following, enjoy a reception; attend survivor-focused information sessions; pick up resources from our booths, and much more!
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Although I was
treated three years ago, this is the first such invitation I have received. So
I wondered whether this was the first such event, or whether there is some
significance to the three-year survival point.
The first hypothesis
was fairly easily answered on the MSKCC web page, where I found the following
previous celebrations:
Thursday, July 5, 2012
More
than 2,000 patients and their guests, caregivers, and healthcare providers
attended Memorial Sloan Kettering’s cancer survivorship celebrations last
month.
Friday, June 21, 2013
Memorial
Sloan Kettering marked National Cancer Survivors Day at its Manhattan campus
and at its regional sites in Westchester, New Jersey, and Long Island.
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Olympic
gymnast Shannon Miller was diagnosed with germ cell ovarian cancer, a very rare
disease, in 2011 and treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Learn more about her
inspiring story.
Clearly hypothesis #1
was not supported by the available data. That led me to hypothesis #2, and got
me to thinking about the question of what constitutes a “cancer survivor.” I
found this:
The National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS)
pioneered the definition of survivor as being any person diagnosed with cancer,
from the time of initial diagnosis until his or her death. This expansive
definition of "survivor" includes people who are dying from
untreatable cancer. NCCS later expanded the definition of survivor even further
to include family, friends and voluntary
caregivers who are affected by the diagnosis in any
way.[6] The
US National Cancer Institute's
Office of Cancer Survivorship uses a variant of this expanded definition.[6]
Based on this
definition, I should have been invited to the survivorship celebration starting
in 2012, the year I was first diagnosed and treated. To be honest, I do not
think I would have appreciated receiving such an invitation at that point, when
I had completed only 4 of the 7 planned cycles of chemotherapy, and it was not
clear that I was responding as well as we had hoped. What I do not know is why
I was not invited for the last two years, the first and second anniversaries of
diagnosis, in 2013 and 2014. As I have often noted about MSKCC, I am grateful for
their incredible expertise in the treatment of rare cancers, but most patients would
be sorely disappointed if they expected MSKCC to provide the TLC that other
centers emphasize.
The main point is
that I am here now, three years later, and whether or not I can officially be
called a “survivor” really does not matter much. We just have to take things
one day at a time. And we plan to attend the event this June.
Love,
Rebecca
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