Taking Chances - Early Cancer Diagnosis

If I play the lottery, there’s a very good chance I won’t win it. Still, sometimes I play it anyway.

If I take the subway during flu season, there’s a very good chance I might pick up a bug. But I take the subway anyway.

Going anywhere in a car is risky, very risky, but I will chance it, spending a few hours of every week sitting behind the wheel.

There is a decent chance that I carry a gene that puts me at an up to 70 per cent chance of developing a life-threatening cancer.

And unlike winning the lottery, getting the flu, or having a fender-bender, I have the unique opportunity of being able tolook into a crystal ball to find out if I have this gene.

Ok, it’s not a crystal ball. More like a petri-dish. Or a cotton swab. And the person telling my fortune will not be a mysterious Roma dripping in fake gems. It will be someone in a lab coat, and my fortune-telling surroundings will not be a veil-draped caravan, it will be a stark, decidedly unromantic clinic. But the question is not, can I have my future told, can I find out what my chances are? The question is, should I?

Should I find out if I, like 1 in 10 Jewish women in Ontario, carry the BRCA 1/ BRCA 2 genetic mutation?
I have already signed up for the study. I did that much, and I did it immediately. You may think this means that I want to find out if I carry the gene. But I’m not sure.

I am a worrier. I worry about my older daughter falling off the swing at the playground. I worry about my younger daughter crying alone in her room before our nanny hears that she has woken up from her nap. I worry about my husband consuming too much sodium. I worry about getting cancer and leaving my children while they are still children.

So I signed up to get the test to see if I carry a genetic mutation that puts me at a risk 4 or 5 times greater than the average woman, of getting a potentially deadly cancer. And I’ll probably take the test.
But then what? I may have to wait up to a year for results. Will I spend a good number of those nights laying in bed, not sleeping, wondering whether or not I carry this gene?

What if I find out I do carry the gene?

Will I worry myself into paralysis in between the appointments for advanced screening that will be permanently offered post positive-result?

Will I havemajor prophylactic surgery to prevent the cancer from developing?

I’d like to say, no, I won’t, but the truth is, I might.

I might become so preoccupied with the elevated possibility that I will get cancer that I will forget how to enjoy living a healthy life. I don’t want that.

Too many questions revolving around one answer. So do I stick my head in the sand and live in a self-imposed ignorance?

Chances are, I would worry about a future cancer diagnosis anyway.

If I do that, I pass up the opportunity for an early diagnosis and intervention, should it come to that.
If I do that, I might not find out until it’s too late.

If I do that, I dismiss the possibility that the result would be negative.

I think I’ll take the test.

Because even if I do not get the result I want; even if I find out that I carry a genetic mutation that gives me a 7 in 10 chance that I will get breast and/or ovarian cancer, the truth will be the same whether or not I have the test.

So if the universe has already dealt my hand whether or not I take the test, but taking the test increases my chances of not just becoming another statistic?

Well, I guess there are in fact some chances I’m willing to take.

This is an original post for Canada Moms Blog. Karen also writes at The Kids Are Alright.