Nova Rizkiyah

“After surgery, we talked again, this time discussing chemo, radiation, and prognosis. By this point, I had learned a couple of basic rules. First, detailed statistics are for research halls, not hospital rooms. The standard statistic, the Kaplan-Meier curve, measures the number of patients surviving over time. It is the metric by which we gauge progress, by which we understand the ferocity of a disease. For glioblastoma, the curve drops sharply until only about 5 percent of patients are alive at two years. Second, it is important to be accurate, but you must always leave some room for hope. Rather than saying, “Median survival is eleven months” or “You have a ninety-five percent chance of being dead in two years,” I’d say, “Most patients live many months to a couple of years.” This was, to me, a more honest description. The problem is that you can’t tell an individual patient where she sits on the curve: Will she die in six months or sixty? I came to believe that it is irresponsible to be more precise than you can be accurate. Those apocryphal doctors who gave specific numbers (“ The doctor told me I had six months to live”): Who were they, I wondered, and who taught them statistics?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air