Chance of a Lifetime
(Page 2 of 3)
March-April 2009
by Forrest Church, from the book Love & Death
Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about life’s odds. Four months ago I was diagnosed with a particularly savage form of esophageal cancer. Odds were, my doctor told me, I had only months to live. Entering all my variables into the relevant actuarial tables, the odds were 20 to 1 against me.
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My father died of cancer at 59. His father died at 59 as well, of a heart attack. I am 58. The chapter I found myself opening offered compelling reason to believe it would be the last one in my book. And then I started beating the odds. Against all expectations, the cancer had not metastasized. A talented surgeon removed my esophagus, replacing it, conveniently, with my stomach. The post-op pathology brought us more good news. The margins were clear, the lymph nodes negative, and the tumor had barely penetrated the esophageal wall. New odds now: 3 to 1 that I am cured.
If there’s a moral to this story—beyond the obvious one that I might usefully have quit drinking and smoking decades before I did—it doesn’t lie on the surface of these shifting odds. If my cancer returns to kill me, it won’t be unfair, only unlucky, in the same sense that I was lucky to beat the odds that seemed at first to make survival a chancy bet. Beating the odds, I began to realize, had nothing to do with the stakes of the mortality table. The truth of the matter struck me with tremendous force. I’d beaten the odds already, won the house on a zillions-to-one wager 58 years before, the moment I was born.
“What did I do to deserve this?” we ask when things turn against us, forgetting that we did nothing to deserve being placed in the way of trouble and joy in the first place. The odds against each one of us being here are so mind-staggering that they cannot be computed.
We’re talking miracles here. Not an unlikely miracle, like God parting the Red Sea for Moses to escape the Egyptians, but the miracle of water itself, in which living organisms can incubate, and enough warmth and light from the sun to establish conditions for life to be nurtured and develop here on Earth.
Consider the odds more intimately. Your parents had to couple at precisely the right moment for the one possible sperm to fertilize the one possible egg that would result in your conception. Right then, the odds were still a million to one against your being the answer to the question your biological parents were consciously or unconsciously posing. And that’s just the beginning. The same happenstance must repeat itself throughout the generations. From the turn of the 12th century, we each have, mathematically speaking, 1 million direct ancestors.