Gratitude Practice 2024 Feb 29: The Mite of Medical Math and Margins
More and more each day, I am discovering that so much of this fun cancer adventure is about data, numbers, measurement and math. I am growing ever so grateful for a thing I've come to refer to as Mighty Medical Math.
Historically, I'm a bit math phobic while simultaneously being seriously intrigued and inspired by data. Love me some data and compelling statistics and hold me back when it comes by way of a well organized compelling infographic…be still my beating nerdy heart. But actual math…like real head-y computational math…ew…doh…and yikes. So grateful for the way really math smart humans can measure, organize, process and track information…and especially now during this little health crisis.
Through both my daily medical conversations and my overflowing MyChart inbox, I am learning so much about the importance of medical math and just how much I have underestimated the mite of a silly thing known as numbers. So much data. So many tests and percentages and comparisons. Endless fractions and formulas, estimations and predictions. So many tables and graphs of every kind. Lots of stuff measured in endless things referred to as “mL’s” and “m” a “L.” There are so many “cm’s.” There are “quarter turns to the left” and “fractional alternatives to the right” all are ever so slightly but strategically determined every day based on what happened yesterday and all seem to be making really impactful outcomes. There are bags of “cc’s” of various liquids and cocktails that hang above my head and strategically drip life saving tumor destroying poison into my body at just the right speed and at just the right dose. There is a series of actual lasers carefully positioned ONTO to my body every day that shoot radiation at just the right angle and at just the right decimal. LASERS. Medical math is just so crazy cool and critically important and I'm just so grateful for the really smart people who actually like and understand math and did well in math and who are now using their specialized big nerdy math brains to help me kick a little (or a lot) of cancer ass.
Grateful for all of the critical math chatter that my stellar team of cancer crime fighters exchange between each other as they provide the most excellent, tender and thoughtful care.
Grateful for these very detailed math conversations, that I only remotely pretend to understand...but also not at all. Grateful for what this late math bloomer is finally learning. AND just wait until I actually start to comprehend what they are talking about because then I'm going to seriously clean up on Jeopardy…take that all of you distracted half-focused contractually obligated crappy Drivers Ed/Basketball Ball Coach/Math Teachers of my youth. Grateful to know and now better understand the importance of math. Grateful that inside this mind bending time, I'm confident that big hope always lives inside tiny but very mighty math margins.