Playing the numbers games
By: Mark Davies
Tags: Cancer, Middlesbrough, Cricket, Labuschagne, Chemotherapy

In a world of uncertainty, there’s great comfort to be taken in the things we can rely on

I’ve always liked a numbers game.

When Middlesbrough Football Club, one of the great loves of my life, are going for promotion or facing relegation, which is often, I like nothing more than drawing up predictions of they will fare based on points available and games to play.

When I played league cricket at a very lowly level, I was fastidious about keeping a record of my batting average. This was spectacularly ruined early one season when I managed two first ball dismissals in two days over a holiday weekend. Tears flowed in the musty dressing room in south Manchester. I was not going to be a Geoff Boycott (and in almost all ways but one this would of course prove to be a roundly good thing).

As a 14-year-old I was obsessed by Top of the Pops and the charts, poring over the ups and downs and even making my own cardboard version of the Top 40 so I could entertain the family cat with a weekly rundown, seeing him almost burst with over-excitement as I prepared to reveal the new number 1. Even now I can spend useful hours away from Twitter by looking at my most-played songs on my iPhone (current winner is Mr E’s Beautiful Blues by the Eels with six hours of listening time, since you ask).

When I went to college my dad bought me one of the early Amstrad computers which I used to good effect by compiling a record of all the Middlesbrough games I’d ever been to, breaking it down to overall stats on wins, draws and losses, highest goal scorers, most player appearances etc..

You get the picture.

So one of the few upsides of having cancer is the chance to rekindle my love of numbers. I have myeloma, which is a blood cancer. What has happened, in a nutshell, is that some of the plasma cells in my bone marrow – a type of white blood cell which when working properly make up a part of the immune system – have become cancerous. As part of this, they release an antibody called paraprotein, which has no useful purpose other than providing an indicator of the level of cancerous activity in my bone marrow.

Bear with me, as my O Level biology grade was unclassified. And that’s not good. I sometimes wonder if this is the revenge of Miss Fry, the very patient but ultimately the (justifiably) very frustrated biology teacher at school.

When I was first diagnosed with myeloma, the warning sign had been the level of paraproteins shown by a routine blood test. It should be close to zero but my number was 25. Over the last few years it has edged up slowly and in the summer it reached 35, enough for the consultant to decide we needed a deeper look at what was going on. Sure enough it showed the cancer was active in my back.

So now I am on chemo – day 57 of a possible 182, split into six cycles (28 days each) running continuously, made up of a daily thalidomide tablet and weekly steroids and injections. The number I am watching is my paraprotein level as the key indicator of what’s happening.

There are many others of course and each month I get a print out of my blood results. But for me the paraprotein level is the headline. I get the result for the second cycle next week. But the first 28 days saw it fall from 35 to 16, which was very encouraging. The aim is to get it below 3, which should be enough to move to the next stage of this, a stem cell transplant. That’s a big deal but I can’t think about it just yet.

I haven’t as yet created my own little chart to show my paraprotein scores but I might. It might be crude but on the days when this challenge feels like trying to cycle up the steepest of mountains – while still at the bottom digesting an unwise croissant – it helps to have some numbers to work with.

The other new development is that I have been moved to a programme called chemotherapy in the community. It means I will be administering all the chemo drugs myself. I’ve bought a little fridge to store the toxic drugs and had a refresher on injecting myself. It means my hospital visits are reduced to one a month which is great from a COVID-19 perspective but I will miss the chance for a chat with the nurses. As for all of us, social encounters are much reduced these days and their care and friendliness is weekly blessing.

So on Monday I will be ringing the team for my myeloma numbers. If Boro win at the weekend I will be reassessing my overview of our chance of promotion. I’ve got half an eye on the Australia-India test match – Labuschagne is going to be a record breaker whose stats need looking at. I might note down how many sixes I’ve hit in my over 50 cricket career (easy, it’s one, last summer for the mighty Ministry of Justice CC). No-one is going to catch the Eels anytime soon in my personal top 40 (unless I spend an hour jumping up and down to Mr Brightside to say farewell to this cursed year, and I won’t say that’s not possible).

It’s an uncertain world made all the more uncertain for me thanks to the paraproteins. So while my obsession with certain numbers – yes, yes, cricket statistics – risks my public image as a witty, urbane sophisticat somewhat, I take great comfort in their certainty. No-one, not even Donald Trump, can argue that Marnus Labuschagne doesn’t have a remarkable record – eight 50s in just 14 tests! It’s just true, like, err, the outcome of the US electoral college, but let’s not get it to that.

Of course the numbers for me can move in the wrong direction. Let’s hope not, but either way they are the numbers, and they tell me more that’s helpful than the daily niggles, the occasional pain and the many hours of late night speculation and, worse, anxiety.

So in all this and more, I’m sticking with them.