Number-ology

I am not a superstitious person, except when it comes to footy tipping or footy games with Hawthorn playing. I believe that once you've decided your footy tips, you should never change them, it's tempting fate.  And sometimes I think Hawthorn does better on the telly if I'm out of the room. It works best if my husband watches the game and intermittently yells "Buddy's kicked another one!" but that doesn't always happen.

I don't have a lucky number, lucky undies, a rabbits foot, an amulet, a side of the road that's better for me, and I don't believe in Friday the 13th. My dad's birthday has frequently fallen on a Friday, and he may even have been born on an actual Friday 13th, I'm not sure, but he's an absolute wonder, a gentleman and sage, and his mum raised him right, so 13 is no big deal. Additionally, according to the tv show QI, the devil's number is not 666, it's actually 661, so I like the number 6: there are 6 in my immediate family, and I have six nieces and nephews on my side of the family, so 6, its multiples and variants are fine with me. Also, I have had two black cats who I've loved intensely and who brought me only good times. Lately I have been asked a multitude of times whether I have had a run in with a chinaman, but the man who delivers our takeaway is perfectly lovely and once brought his son over with him because he wanted to meet Molly, our dog. So luck is hogwash to me, and so is superstition.

It's funny how many numbers are considered to be lucky or unlucky. 13, 666, 7, birthdates, disaster dates, anniversaries, there are so many numbers on which we place significance. In Chinese culture I believe the number 8 is auspicious, while numerology can spin any number into a collection of attributes, either positive or negative. It's the luck of the draw where you end up. Or, in other terms, your numerology number is a random idea arrived at by adding your birthdate together with attributes someone, somewhere, made up. Or maybe it's Egyptian. I don't know, I'm not in the mood for research today, and it might have just been made up by an ancient Egyptian anyway.

Randomness, coincidence, luck, superstition, auspicion (probably not a word, spellchecker doesn't like it), fate, karma, kismet, serendipity, curses, hexes, all a bunch of stuff desperately trying to explain the unexplainable: life and what happens in it. The good and the bad. And numbers feature a lot, ask a gambler. Also, I'm pretty sure the entire TV show 'Lost' would have been exactly that without all this bullshit (pardon my low English). Stevie Wonder had it right, 'superstition ain't the way'.

So 13 and 666 are not scary to me, nor is 661, the 'new' devil's number. We choose to place our own meanings on numbers and ideologies, superstitions and lucky undies, including choosing our spirituality (I prefer that word to "religion") and very rarely could it be considered a rational choice, as it involves some incarnation of faith. I have faith, but I think numbers are just numbers.

Here are some numbers that mean something if you or I want them to, or don't: 18, 21, 30, 39, 40, 50, all decades onwards to 100, 2, 31, 700, 4.

We come of age at 18 and are lawfully able to drink, drive, take responsibility for our own choices, and are old enough to go to prison. So why do we come of age again at 21? Tradition, habit, expectation, or an excuse for another party with better speeches? We place the meaning where we want to.

30, 40, 50, 60... 100. More age milestones we place meaning on. We get the sense of time passing us by, valued youth departing, age and decrepitude advancing. Bunkum. The phrase 'you're only as old as you feel' is cliched for a reason, it's true. I'm 38, have a walking stick, a shower chair, a disabled parking pass and an (albeit borrowed) wheelchair. Do you think I feel 38? Before all of this, I felt like a teenager most of the time. There are many people we meet and are surprised to learn their age, either because of their attitude or appearance. (So Nick, lose the hang ups about this year's milestone, will ya? You'll always be funky Nicko to me).

39 is another age milestone, though you may not recognize it, as it may be irrelevant to you. It's the age when women's fertility, their ability to not only conceive but to carry a healthy, genetically viable baby to term, drops dramatically. Yay, looking forward to my very next birthday. Yeah. But numbers mean nothing unless you let them. My body's real age could place me in a nursing home, so any kind of fertility, present or absent, could just be theory.

Here are the other numbers without meaning that I listed: 2, 31, 700 and 4. I'm going to work backwards on these.

I'm really questioning my wisdom in divulging this next one, because although my perspective on numbers is pretty well set, it doesn't work that way for everyone else. I haven't advertised that I have stage 4 cancer because a) some people don't know what the categorisations mean and panic, or b) they do know and they still panic. And truly, in my case it's not what it sounds like. Stage four is briefly and basically where the primary tumour has spread to another organ, but there are really two types of stage 4: the kind where they prepare you for the worst, and the kind where they don't. I am in the latter category and grateful for it. But you can see why I haven't shared this info around. It actually doesn't mean anything except in relation to treatment and ongoing screening, and they're sorted. And you'll further see why numbers mean nothing in just a moment.

There's a number called a CEA, which can be found by doing a blood test (the screening I mentioned above). It doesn't really matter but for those curious, it stands for carcinoembryonic antigen. The average person without cancer can have a CEA of up to 6 or 7. Cancer patients can have numbers over 1000. Before my surgeries (sorry for those who already know all this) I had a number in the 700s. I didn't know I had cancer. So that number had no bearing on how I felt or what I thought. I didn't know about the number at the time, I only learnt about it recently, so what meaning can it possibly have to me? After surgery the number dropped to 31. You think if they take out a tumour or two that's the cancer gone, but apparently not. But the real advance was my recent reading of 2, which at the time was nothing short of astonishing. That's a reading in the normal range for a person without cancer. You're going to insist that this has meaning, and I'll grant you it's a result to celebrate, and I don't disregard it or wish to complain. I'm just very frustrated.

The reason it means nothing yet is that I don't feel better. When I was apparently in the 700s I felt ill. I still feel ill with a CEA of 2. And although it's great, I'm glad my doctors are telling me I'm doing well, I'm still feeling crap and can't work and can't resume normal activity. I won't go into it again; if you think you're sick of hearing about it, imagine how sick of it all I am. I repeat: I'm just very frustrated.

So perhaps I should stop being a grumblebum. I'll reverse all my stone cold logic about meaningless numbers and come up with some that I place some happy meaning on. Even though it's bunkum. I'm allowed to be inconsistent because even though earlier I said I'm superstitious about changing my footy tips, I did exactly that last week and I was right to do so. So there.

Some happy numbers. 15: Luke Hodge. 23: Buddy Franklin. 35: the number of millilitres left to go right now in my portable chemo pump. 113: the number of days since chemo started. 43: the numbers of days until chemo will be finished, and hopefully normal life can begin again. 37: the number of days until my wedding anniversary, where I get to go to the footy for the first time this year, and in the corporate box no less. 5: the number of years my husband has put up with me. 3: the number of chemo sessions to go.

Without number: the abundance of supporters who work so hard to keep me sane and upbeat, and tell me I look well and even "beautiful" when I feel anything but. I try to reduce my miserable sod-ness for you all. Thank you.