My four-hour train ride to Toronto in advance of tomorrow's meeting of the Ovarian Cancer Canada Board of Directors turned into a more than five-hour trip. I can't say that I minded though. I did my morning Duolingo lessons on my phone, then reviewed the meeting materials and solved today's New York Times Sudoku puzzles on my laptop.

And then I pulled out a book—a real one, as opposed to an e-book, which is more my habit. What a luxury it was to put down the electronic devices and stare at printed text on light gray paper, devouring each page as we swayed down the tracks, or stopped entirely because another train was passing.

Coincidentally, I had started reading this very book in the spring on the train home from Toronto after the last in-person meeting of the Ovarian Cancer Canada Board of Directors. I had met a friend for supper the night before the meeting and she had given me Kate Bowler's book No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear). Bowler is a Canadian academic and writer, an associate professor at Duke University, and the author of several books, including her memoir about her experience of being diagnosed with and treated for Stage 4 colon cancer. As she describes in Chapter One of No Cure For Being Human, she asked her doctor a very logical question:

— "I'd like to know what my odds are. Of living. I'd like to know if I will live."

— "I only know how to answer that by telling you the median survival rate for people who share your diagnosis. Based on the information we have about people with Stage Four colon cancer, the survival rate is fourteen percent."

— "What does survival mean in this context?"

— "Two years."

I never finished the book in the spring, perhaps because I wasn't comfortable thinking about life and death at that moment in my own cancer journey. Maybe Bowler's description of her "first real conversation since the diagnosis" reminded me too much of my own first real conversation with an oncologist after my unofficial diagnosis of ovarian cancer by an emergency room physician. When the oncologist told me that 80% of patients treated for ovarian cancer will experience a recurrence and, if it recurs, the disease is usually incurable, I felt the gravity of the situation in which I found myself.

But last Friday's meeting with—coincidentally—the same oncologist that I had met in 2020 has painted a much more hopeful picture. He now estimates my chance of recurrence at less than 10%.

And so I came back to Bowler's book today with a different perspective. Art is like that: a piece that we're not ready for on one day feels perfectly suitable on another.

I made it far enough into Bowler's book to learn that she had qualified for a clinical trial. She was one of only 3% of patients whose tumours were more likely to respond to a new kind of cancer treatment called "immunotherapy." Though I haven't yet finished the book, I know that Bowler was diagnosed in 2015, published her memoir in 2021, and is still alive today.

In another full-circle moment, I had dinner this evening with the same friend who had given me No Cure For Being Human in the spring. She is a divine soul, a mystical storyteller and a very special human being.