Nutshell

Medical decisions are difficult to make when all paths come to the same end, The End, and all bad things come in time. Women take many different approaches, and I'm not sure that one is fundamentally better than the next.

Some women refuse to talk about quality of life (qol) until their qol has more or less slipped away. They don't want to be "kept comfortable". They want to throw everything medical science has at what they sometimes describe as "The Beast". They will suffer any side effect or indignity... just let them be doing something.

Women with young children are particularly inclined to the above. Very often they have a goal of staying alive until their youngest is out of highschool.

Some women eschew medical care as much as possible, but lean toward herbal remedies, dietary changes, or a combination of positive thinking and denial.

And I just want to live as long as possible while still being able to have fun. I think that's it in a nutshell for me.

The scans say that there's growth of the nodules in my lungs. This is unfortunate, because two onocologists have said and one has implied that the scattered specks that have shown in scans may or may not have been metastatic disease. There was reason to believe that my disease was merely bony, which makes a big difference in length of survival.

In a field scattered with landmines of maybes, my life expectancy (such as it is) maybe was just cut in half. Or not. As always, there's no way to know anything, except that I'm ultimately fucked.

I don't know what I'm going to do, but I suspect that I'll do very little, for now.

And unless he or she has been diagnosed with a stage IV cancer, I'm not particularly interested in anyone's opinion about "next steps".

(Although I know that most folks don't have opinions as much as they have concerns. I think it sucks, too. And as usual, there's really nothing to say.)