So tomorrow is the day when, or so I believe, decisions will be made about treatment. I must admit to a certain apprehension. My reports aren't done, the stack of marking is growing, if anything, and I do not quite know how surgery/after-care/yadda will all pan out. I know that the words 'after care' are somewhat euphemistic in Korea, where there is an assumption that everybody has somebody to come and help them out in hospital- the nurses get paid to jab and stab, and that's about it. Seriously, home-bods, there is an expectation that you have a companion in hospital with you to take care of, well... the care.There are a few decisions to be made about how that will be managed.

So I will worry about it tomorrow. For now, let me pick up on the tale as we have left it:

I advise against research. Not all research, obviously, but when one is facing an illness that could actually kill one, it does one no good to know too much.
While I was in Jeju, waiting to be required to go out in the middle of the night and yell at the girls for tearing around the corridors and smoking and sneaking boys into their rooms (Have been too long in public education. It never happened. I told the girls to go to bed at ten, and Lord help me, they did it without a peep. I shake my head...) I spent half an hour looking up Stage II breast cancer on the Internet. And then I stopped. According to the first two of the sites there, the survival rate is 73%.

Now, this is a little mis-leading, I have since been told by the very wise Connie K. This number does not mean that I have a 73% chance of living. Instead, it means that out of every hundred people with what I have, 73 of them are still alive ten years after treatment.

Ah. Well that's much more reassuring, then, isn't it? There I was, the teacher that I am, thinking that it was like a score on a report card:

A C????? They're only giving me a C?????? (Ann would point out here that at her school, they'd already have put me on academic probation, a 73% being a D grade at SFS)

But no, Connie says. It is not like a grade on a report card. It is nothing like that. You don't improve your grade by working really hard and memorising your vocabulary.

It was enough to make me stop looking things up on the internet, I can tell you, though!

So when we're sitting back at the consultant's desk, he confidently opens up his own Internet page (the doctor is looking this stuff UP???? HUH??) and finds his own website, and tells me with some confidence that the odds are actually 82%, after treatment.

P: Hey! That's a B-!
Connie: We've been through this.

(Connie, I know you are likely to be reading this, and I know that you are being subjected to a great deal of editing in my recounting of our conversations. Please forgive the liberties I am taking for the sake of advancing the narrative. I promise that you will always be presented as I have found you to be through these last two years: fabulous, patient, oh-so-very-wise, and deeply kind. And possibly  exasperated when it comes to dealing with my vacillations. I am more grateful than you know for your presence at these consultations.)

But STILL: a slightly better percentage than my website gave me. I am inclined to like his website rather more than my own. I am also inclined to play those odds.

82 is higher than 73.

Roll on, tomorrow. Let's get this nasty thing out.