When my wife was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer earlier this year, she was essentially prepared to die. She didn't even cry once. Her father had died from the same cancer at around the same age as her (early 40s), in the most horrific way imaginable. Her father used to work for the Soviet military in charge of a team of people who created communist propaganda so he was a strong believer in communism and he was already devastated by the collapse of the USSR. But then bowel cancer finished him off. My wife was in her teens at the time and she said he was extremely angry and not himself for years until he died. The chemo made him extremely sick, destroyed his body, and he had to have a colostomy bag. Years later, after my wife met me, we experienced a lot of hardship together; just one episode of bad luck after another... Like, almost every aspect of our lives which we didn't control. So by the time she got her cancer diagnosis, it's as though she was expecting it.

It turns out that she has a relatively rare genetic condition which increases the probability of bowel cancer by about 10x... These cancers are known to respond very poorly to standard chemo (and likely explains her father's horrible death decades earlier). This is where our luck finally turned though. We got lucky, possibly for the first time since we've been together. Her cancer turned out to be a kind which is highly responsive to immunotherapy. The most recent trial for the relevant class of drugs showed an unprecedented 100% complete response in about 40 patients (Dostarlimab). Moreover, that same class of (very expensive) drugs became available for her exact case, on the subsidized public list in my country, just one month prior to her diagnosis. After her first month of treatment, the tumor had shrunk by like 50% in diameter. Now, 5 months later, there is no evidence of cancer on the MRI.

I feel like the experience has completely changed my wife's perspective of life in a fundamental way. Before this, she lived her entire life expecting that things never get better and all news is bad news.

These days I often think about the ancient Chinese tale "The old man lost his horse." It's insane how little control we actually have over the most important aspects of our lives and how something terrible (like a tumor which doesn't respond to chemo) can become a positive (but responds extremely well to immunotherapy).