Imagine you’re sitting on a bench, enjoying a sunny day, when a stranger handcuffs your wrist to a duffel bag containing three sticks of dynamite wired to an alarm clock.
That’s what it feels like to hear that you have cancer.
Tumors do two very bad things. They grow and they spread.
They need one thing to do either: time.
Cancers discovered earlier are almost always more survivable. Treatments started sooner are almost always more effective.
Early detection saves lives.
Too many people avoid screening tests because they’re quietly afraid of the answer. Their mistake is believing it’s better not to know something than to get bad news.
But when time is the difference between living and dying, bad news is better than no news at all.
As important as early detection is, immediately getting to the right treatment plan may be even more critical.
Once diagnosed, patients too often start down one care path before being redirected to the right treatment after valuable time has passed. Others never find their way to the right answer — and lose the opportunity to join a clinical trial by waiting too long or having ineffective treatments disqualify them from the study.
People will go a long way to get something they want, but balk at traveling to get what they need. They’ll drive an hour and a half for a better deal on a new car. But if they get bad news medically, they’re reluctant to drive the same hour and a half to get an answer.
Sometimes that’s dangerous.
If you’re lucky, you’ll only be told that you have cancer once in your lifetime. If it happens, right beats close.
Let’s go back to the duffel bag. The clock is ticking. It shows that the bomb will explode in one hour.
There’s an Army base 45 minutes away. Much closer, only 15 minutes in the opposite direction, is a locksmith.
Where do you go?
If the locksmith can open the handcuffs, you can solve the problem more quickly by going there. But if they fumble with the lock, you’ll be using up valuable time you could have spent driving to the Army base, where they can defuse the bomb.
Time you’d no longer have.
Your best move was always to head directly to the Army base. If you guess wrong and the locksmith can’t save you, it’s game over.
Same with cancer.
Go where they know which wires to cut.