On September 21, 2017, I entered the fifth year after surgery and consulted my attending doctor about future treatment.

"You have passed the two years after surgery when the danger of cancer progression is extremely high, and we have monitored you continuously for the two years after that. There has been no change. Maybe you no longer need to continue anticancer drugs."

"What? Right after surgery I was told, 'Unfortunately cancer tissue has metastasized. Please spend the rest of your life without regret,' and I have been living with that in mind."

"Nobody knows how things will change many years ahead. Better this than being told you will not recur and then recurring. You know that recurrence and progression are overwhelmingly more common."

The five-year survival rate for people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer is often said to be about eight percent. Another statistic called conditional five-year relative survival, says that the eight percent at diagnosis improves to about forty percent if one survives two years, exceeds seventy percent at four years, and reaches eighty percent at five years. In other words, if someone survives four years, the probability of surviving another five years, nine years from diagnosis, exceeds seventy percent.

I knew those statistics, and I also knew they do not directly determine an individual's condition. Personally, I had thought of it as a fifty-fifty choice: either stable or progressing.

If this state were to be written in words, the doctor said it would be something like "a state that appears to be cured." It cannot be called complete cure. In cancer, even when disease is stable and clinically no longer problematic, microscopic cancer cells may still remain somewhere and recur. Looking it up in English, the word remission feels closest.

As a result of the consultation, we concluded that there was little meaning in continuing chemotherapy while I was in a "state that appears to be cured." If the situation changes, we can simply restart. Treatment would stop when the current fifty-second cycle ended. Even with the qualifier "appears to be," being told the word "cured" was an entirely unexpected miscalculation.

Now, what should I do from here? CT scans every three months and blood tests every six weeks remain, but I will be released from the low-condition periods that occupied half of each month and from the constraints of the medication schedule. Life may change — and perhaps I can change it as well. To put it grandly, I must redesign a life plan based on a miscalculation. That too may be enjoyable.

"Knowing you, I think you will still be healthy at ninety. You will probably be complaining that you do not have enough retirement funds." A friend told me that soon after surgery, when I was spending money as inspiration took me. I hope it becomes a needless worry.

This record of my battle with illness will pause here for now.

The battle with illness will continue, but because the main cancer treatment has stopped, there is no longer a strong need to record its progress. From here on, I would rather invite you to other pages — Fukudoya Gallery, Travel, and beyond.
See you there.