#931: Lanes explain

[The panels are arranged top to bottom. The first is set above a larger image.]

Friend: So, are you guys out of the woods?

Cueball: We don’t know.

Friend: Well, did the treatment work?

Cueball: We don’t know.

[Cueball’s next few lines are set by themselves in their own panels, arranged around a larger image.]

Cueball: I always assumed that when you got cancer, they gave you a prognosis, then treated you, and at the end of treatment either you beat it or you died.

[The diagram shows a simple highway. Starting at the bottom, with diagnosis for five lanes, the road travels through a cloud of treatment, after which two lanes disappear, and three continue. Later on, there’s another off-ramp labeled ‘cancer “comes back”’, which loops back into the treatment cloud. Otherwise, the highway enters a later cloud called survive.]

Cueball: And I knew sometimes it “recurred,” which I assumed meant back to square one.

Cueball: But that’s turned out not to be quite right.

[Back to Cueball and his friend.]

Cueball: Once most cancers spread out into your body, they’re incurable.

Cueball: If your 10-year prognosis is 60%, that means a 40% chance that some cancer will slip past the treatment and get out.

[The frame zooms in to show just Cueball.]

Cueball: So they kill all the cancer they can find, and then you’re a “survivor.” But your odds are still 60%.

[The panel zooms in further, now showing only Cueball’s top half.]

Cueball: They can’t scan for individual cancer cells. The only way to know if it worked is to wait for tumors to pop up elsewhere.

Cueball: If you go enough years without that happening then you were in the 60%.

[The frame shows both people again.]

Cueball: And often the first sign is a cough or bone pain.

Cueball: So you spend the next five or ten years trying not to worry that every ache and pain is the answer to the question “Do I make it?”

[There’s an extra large panel, with a small one floating inside it.]

[The panel shows fifty-two lanes emerging from the cloud of ‘Treatment’. Signs show 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years, 6 years. Lanes branch off and fade into darkness earlier on the right, with some lanes continuing off the top of the panel.]

[Inset panel.]

Friend: Man.

Friend: Fuck cancer.

Cueball: Seriously.