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The prognosis was a number. The question was what to do with it.
The prognosis was a number. The question was what to do with it.
In 2002, I was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. I was given statistics that described a very small chance of surviving beyond the expected prognosis.
I did not reject the numbers. But I did not take them as a prediction of what had to happen to me either. They described a population. I was one person.
The choice was to accept the prognosis for what it was, while also accepting the challenge of trying to create a different outcome. I could not know what would happen. I could only work with what I had at hand and set my sights on a different destination and visualize a different outcome.
So the question became:
What can I do now to move toward that destination?
Battle for My Brain: F** Your Doctor’s Stats!* grew out of what followed.
It is not an argument against medicine, statistics or medical expertise. It is about participating in your own care, questioning assumptions, making decisions when certainty is impossible, and refusing to confuse probability with destiny.
The book
The book
Battle for My Brain follows what happened after the diagnosis: the decisions, treatments, setbacks, questions and changes that followed when the future could not be known.
It is a personal story, but the questions extend beyond brain cancer.
How should we think about statistics when the individual outcome is uncertain? How do we make decisions when nobody can give us certainty? When should we question an assumption? And what role can we still play when much of what happens is beyond our control?
The answer was never certainty. It was to keep moving forward with the information, choices and possibilities available at the time.
There is no normal. Only forward.
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Battle for My Brain: F** Your Doctor’s Stats!
Sten Oedman
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© 2026 Sten Oedman. All rights reserved.
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