Welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. This week we're talking about the numbers

that can change your life. The numbers you have to deal with when you're diagnosed with

cancer. Let me introduce you to Tam's in Edwards. She has ice blue hair that matches

her blue eyes, which is fitting, as she's a climate scientist who spends a lot of time

researching ice melting. She's a lecturer of physical geography at King's College

London in the UK. My work is all about probabilities. I'm trying to predict the probability of sea

level rise from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets in the future. So you're quite

comfortable with statistics then. It's my sort of bread and butter. So what happened

in your life that changed how you viewed statistics? For me, numbers and statistics

have always been something a little bit abstract on the page, something in computer code.

But for me last year they became real when I got diagnosed with bowel cancer. And I started

to have to deal with lots of probabilities about how long it might take for the cancer

to recur, how likely it was for me to survive, and suddenly the statistics felt quite different.

So what were the numbers Tam's in had to confront? Well the first one was survival rates.

Tam's in had surgery to remove most of the cancer, but they saw it had spread to a lymph

node. When she left the hospital, she did what many of us would do and turned to the internet

for more information. I accidentally read a statistic about the survival rates for people

in whom it had spread to local lymph nodes. I think it was along the lines of 40% survival.

It could have been after five years. And I had a very sleepless night that night.

This 40% figure would scare anyone and it scared Tam's in until she started to think it

through using her statistical knowledge. And I latched onto this phrase that it was

for people who had a spread to local lymph nodes. And I realised later I sort of thought,

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