you were diagnosed with terminal cancer?

As most of you are aware, I recently lost my wife to the fight of our lives, pancreatic cancer. Since her passing, I've spent in excess of 1500 hours watching many medical youtube videos on the subject of cancer screenings, diagnosis and treatments. I will never know everything about the subject, however I am now far more knowledgeable than when my wife was first diagnosed in 2024.

8 out of 10 pancreatic tumors are unresectable. This is due to the cancer being diagnosed late in most cases. Then, the BIG one is the tumor generally wraps itself around some very important veins and arteries. This makes surgery all but impossible.

This link from the world famous John Hopkins hospital explains it:

https://blogs.pathology.jhu.edu/pancreas/treatment-of-pancreatic-cancers-that-involves-major-blood-vessels/

During the same time frame my wife and I were pulling out all the stops, I was referred to and stayed in touch with two other women who were fighting pancreatic cancer at the same time my wife was. Mary had been fighting her pancreatic cancer for four years. She had been on THREE different types of chemo during that time frame. Two were standard-of-care chemo and the third was a clinical trial (she had been rejected by three clinical trials before finally being accepted into a fourth....).

She also received radiation therapy during the four year time frame. Her doctors had hoped both the chemo and the radiation would shrink her pancreatic tumor. Instead, her pancreatic tumor grew LARGER over the four years! YIKES and double YIKES!!

Ultimately, she went to see the top brass at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. After reviewing her medical chart, MRIs and CAT scans they told her there was nothing they could do for her. go home and get your will, trust and personal affairs in order.......she passed a few months before my wife passed.

All said, I learned a lot from swapping text messages with her during the last few weeks of her journey and I appreciate her taking the time to share with me.

The second woman, Tracy, walked into a store I frequent and told one of the sales people she had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The sales associate knew me and knew my wife was battling pancreatic cancer. He asked me to please call Tracy so I did. That began two months of back and forth texting between her and I. I shared many details of my wife's battle and she shared with me. Tracy died two months after she first walked into the store. There was a LOT of valuable information exchanged between her and I and I am very grateful that she was willing to swap text messages with me.

Four months before she passed away, my wife and I were referred to a top notch oncologist/hematologist. He told my wife and I that he has treated 300 pancreatic cancer patients using standard-of-care chemotherapy. Of the 300 patients he has treated, 298 died within one year of starting chemo. The two who survived were under the age of 40. Since the average life expectancy of someone diagnosed with pancreatic cancer is 90 days, the chemo stretched their life out a whopping nine months. And, I might add, it wasn't a very pleasant nine months for either the patient or their families....

A friend of a friend, Dan, was diagnosed with colon cancer. After $300,000 in chemotherapy he tried to have surgery. After they opened him up, the surgeons found they could not remove the tumor. He woke in the hospital bed with a note pinned to his bed that read, "We are not able to do surgery, you are going to die". Nice way to break the news, they didn't appear to have the gonads to sit down with the man and tell him to his face. Dan passed away at the age of 38.

One of the major items I have learned is your local hospital may NOT have the necessary equipment/treatment plans and/or expertise to fight your particular type cancer. You may need to be prepared to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to get the CORRECT treatment for your particular cancer.

That means travel expenses, gasoline, hotel bills, food costs, etc etc. items your medical insurance most likely will not cover. Typically, the hospital or doctor will need to first get approval from your medical insurance company. This alone can take up to two weeks. After approval they then need to schedule you for your first appointment. This also can take from one week to several months. Meanwhile, your cancer is RAGING.....

There was a man in my area who was diagnosed with lymphoma. He started chemotherapy with a local outpatient chemo center. During chemo, he got more and more sick and felt worse and worse. After much searching, he found that Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York offered stem cell treatments for his particular type of cancer. He took a second mortgage out on his house and rented an apartment in New York. After one year of stem cell treatments, he was cancer free. Now he has a large home mortgage to deal with but at least he has his health.....

I am beginning to think that some people may choose to not go through multiple rounds of chemotherapy (if chemo was so great why aren't we all taking chemo daily as a PREVENTATIVE???), radiation (same question....if radiation is so great why aren't we all getting tripple dose radiation daily as a PREVENTATIVE????) and/or surgery.

Recently, I was talking with a friend. One of her family members was recently diagnosed with a terminal cancer. He has decided he is not going to fight it and let nature take its course. If I remember correctly, he is over 65 years of age.

So.....if you were diagnosed with a terminal cancer, would you choose to fight it or let nature take its course?