Rumination and explanation

I'm not fishing for sympathy, really. I just wanted to spend a few minutes thinking and writing about what a diagnosis of cancer has done to me. Each step along this path has provided more specific and worse news, ending in today's "You have 'B-cell type' lymphoma". The survival rate given for the more general umbrella category of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, under which "B-cell type" lies, is between 52-59%, depending on the source, but I'm sure there are even more variations on that theme to come, once we know where I fall in the staging, exactly which "B-cell type" I've got, etc. But just think about those numbers abstractly for a minute: 5 years from now, my chances of being alive are potentially 52-59%. That is, of course, not that much more than a coin flip. What do I make of that information? What can I make of it? I realize it's a good thing to be on the + side of 50%, to be sure; many cancers fall far below that, as did my Uncle's. Even so, for a 42 year old man with no serious health issues to speak of, the chances that "tails will come up" by the time I'm 47 is pretty freaking lousy, I'd say.
I'm not going to stand here and preach about early detection, and go see your doctor regularly, etc. You either do that already or you don't, and besides, finding my cancer was entirely due to some pretty odd doctoring meanderings. I'm not going to say I've found God and that you should too, lest you go to Hell--my vision of whatever's out there is more quizzical anyway; if there is an Almighty, how would our puny human brains/minds/souls even be able to fathom it? I'm also not going to cry about what a bad deal I've gotten either--for the most part, at any rate--who needs that?
I suppose the point of this entry is less about what has happened than about what will be happening. I'll probably be leavening the Smirky the Chimp illuminations with some more personal statements about the course of my treatments, for example, which will probably not be to everyone's (anyone's?) tastes, and I wanted to warn those of you who might like to opt out of reading those. Other than that, let's go see what trouble we can get into, ok? We can't let the McGrortyites have all the fun, can we?