I went and ran 10mi pretty fast (4:45/km) in the morning to try and “clear my mind” — I do think it’s quite good for that. I think I’m absurdly fit recently, perhaps some combination of being really light, and also descending from 1100m elevation in Calgary to now being at sea level. 4:45 10mi felt like absolutely nothing, whereas previously that’d be near max effort. My watch recorded 153bpm but that’s probably slightly bullshit; I think it was more like 160-165 (I can probably do 175 for a half), so I am fairly confident I can run a sub 90 half now.
I woke up this morning to a scheduled email from me exactly a year ago. 
The subject was “seek inconvenient validation”.
It’s some of the most comically absurd timing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I swear on my life this is real. I did indeed have my Lightspark interview then. It’s ironic because yesterday in my voice message, I was literally complaining about how this was something that I couldn’t just solve with effort and hard work or such, but that it was so incredibly indeterministic and non-obvious. At the time, I was thinking of this as a positive; that I should seek positive validation through doing nondeterministic pursuits. Now it’s the complete opposite; preventing one of the worst outcomes possible via an nondeterministic pursuit.
I spent a lot of time reading about endometrial cancer and my previous assumption of “eh she got a hysterectomy and was fine, so survival rate is basically 100%” is not actually correct. Stage 1B endometrial cancer has a 75% 5 year survival rate. A 25% death rate is a lot higher than I would have thought. Like, really a lot lot lot higher than I thought. I don’t even know what to think of it. It’s kinda like, “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck”, but also, really, what am I going to do? What can I do?
I think the more concerning part of me is that I know she isn’t going to fight it. It’s either this surgery did what it needed to, and she’s cancer free, or she’s almost certain to die within 5 years. She wouldn’t do chemo/radiation/etc. She’d just let it run its course.
Whelp now it’s not just depression, it’s also 25% (probably a bit higher because of noninterventionism) chance of death. This is probably the worst “negative prediction error” of my life — I really thought she was completely fine for the past month. She did seem so much happier and more willing to talk, and we did a ton of things together. She even came with me to meet Vivi, say hi to Rachael, etc. I thought she had a new lease on life.
There’s also a lot of uncertainty, and nuance to the diagnosis other than what Dad told me. And I don’t get to talk with the doctor at all, and there’s also patient privacy laws preventing me from knowing much. There’s a lot of outcome variance depending on these factors, with recurrence influenced by a factor of more than 2 just by the particular type of cells:
Patients with endometrial cancer of the POLE molecular subtypes have a 5-year relapse-free survival rate of 98%, while the rate of those with p53abn subtypes, which is associated with the highest risk for metastasis, is 46.6%.
I’m scared.
I called Vivi for a bit; I honestly just really needed escapism from “spiraling”. I didn’t mention anything was wrong, so we just talked about life, and our thoughts on certain things. I don’t even remember what we talked about, but it really doesn’t matter, since I felt fine for an hour or two there. I finally cleaned my bed and room as we talked; yesterday, I didn’t have enough time to stuff my duvet and put a pillowcase on so I slept on just a “raw” sheet laid on the bed with the uncovered duvet/pillows, and there was a literal box next to me on the bed, since my room is too small to put it anywhere else. It was miserable, but it wasn’t like I was going to get any sleep anyways. I slept ~5hrs. It was a pretty miserable time, I ended up playing music with a sleep timer on Spotify since it would have been too much to be alone with my own thoughts.
I know this would be insane and not what my mom wants at all, but I’m tempted to just take the next flight home. What the fuck does the stupid goddamned Paradigm fellowship do for me if my mom isn’t well. What does anything matter.
It’s scary to have so little control over the world, and the outcomes that really matter to you.