Bone cancer and lung secondaries and June just kept on living her life day by day and was still alive more than 40 years later

What can we learn from people who, medically speaking, should have died but didn’t? June is one of these. She was not expected to survive the cancer in her hip at 21, and certainly wasn’t expected to survive for decades after her first lung metastases occurred. She had less than one chance in 1000 of surviving with an excellent quality of life. So how could that happen?

Doctors are very happy when one of their patients does much better than expected. But they tend not to explore the issue of one amazing case, as their time is taken up on those cases which “really” need their care and attention. Others will suggest that an unexpected recovery was due to a “late effect of treatment” or perhaps to spontaneous regression of the tumour.

However the really important thing to know is whether survivors like June have anything in common or whether there they are so different that we cannot say anything useful.

The first thing to acknowledge is that they are very different as people. Both males and females survive unexpectedly. Some come from high social status work, some are manual workers, some are trades people, teachers, performers, and probably every type of employment. Some come with a lot of education, some with very little.

June had just qualified as a music teacher when she first went down with cancer and later became a single parent in the late 1950s in a conservative community. Her family assisted with childcare as she went back to work to support her son.

The second thing to acknowledge is that despite being very different personalities and with very different backgrounds survivors are people with a lot in common. A major study published in March 2008 in the Qualitative Health Research journal explored Personal Resilience, that quality which all of the survivors had.

Personal resilience had five major dimensions which all participants had to develop and continue during the time they were ill and afterwards. Each of these dimensions were further subdivided into more than 50 components all of which were necessary – none were optional.

These types of findings are a nightmare to medical researchers. Researchers only want to have a couple of variables. Then they want to be able to measure these with a scientific test, or simple questionnaire to thousands of people in order to prove or disprove whether one of the variables can be shown to be important to recovery. Having some 50 variables or components makes it impossible to prove a theory one way or the other.

But isn’t that part of what makes up human? We are all incredibly complex beings. Why should we ever expect healing to be able to be reduced down to one or two or three components?

June lived a very different life to others in the study. The 50 odd components of resiliency did not mean she was a clone of any of the others in the group.

June was a lovely older woman, with a strong religious faith that was very important to her. On one occasion she had a miracle disappearance of a tumor and there was a full medical inquiry after the “unnecessary surgery” found no evidence that there ever had been a tumor there at all.

June had known they would find nothing when they operated but as she had no proof she felt that she couldn’t tell the surgeon and oncologist that God had healed her overnight. That type of conversation was not the sort that she felt that she could have with her medical carers at the time. However she was able to discuss it with the surgeon the next time the secondaries returned.

Most in the study had less dramatic remissions of their condition. But for each person personal resilience was about living life to the fullest day by day according to their values.

The wonderful thing about personal resilience is that we don’t need to prove it to scientific standards because resilience is all about living the life that the person really wants to live. It is not a treatment that has to be proved by randomized controlled trials. It is about each person being true to themselves, fully connected to life in its various components and living moment by moment for every day they have left. Moment by moment, day by day, and for each of these the weeks stretched into months and years, and for June, into decades.

To find out all the details about about what survivors such as June  had in common you need to read  "Beat The Medical Odds."  A review of Beat The Medical Odds can be read here.