You’ve been diagnosed with cancer. (Oh no! That’s awful, I’m so sorry to hear it!) It doesn’t look good; with chemo your odds of living 2 years are 15%. If you’re still alive after 2 years, things look a bit better. Without the chemo, you’ve probably got a couple of months. Your insurance covers it. Do you want the chemo?
I did, but with better odds, in my twenties. I don’t know that I would do it at my age with the odds given in the scenario.
Sounds like I’m up shit creek and I wouldn’t get my hopes up on a 15% chance, but a 15% chance is better than no chance at all. I’d ask for any treatment available. Plus, knowing my luck if I thought ‘forget it’ the day after I become a past-tense person they’d discover a better treatment, so best to fight tooth and claw.
“Chemo” covers a lot of different medicines administered according to a lot of different treatment plans. Some of which are pretty benign in their effect on the patient. Others are pretty severe.
So without knowing which treatment you have in mind, each poster here is just supplying their own personal version of the “chemo boogeyman.”
I know lots of people who’ve been through it with fairly minor consequences and good follow-on results. And also people whom the first treatment attempt damn near killed.
Certainly in the course of any terminal disease in any given person there comes the point where additional treatment is worse than the disease, or is at best neutrally helpful. More days alive is not necessarily the only measure of merit.
The reality of the specific situation will always be much more ambiguous than the neat “2 months versus 15% chance for two more years” formulation.
As such, I think making blanket statements about accepting or refusing entire categories of treatment are probably unhelpful. Many of us will be faced with situations such as this. Rehearsing uninformed decisions based on boogeymen is not real helpful.
Had stage 4 colon cancer. With Chemo they told me about about 5 years. 7 years later,still in remission.
I’ve looked and looked,but I haven’t found an expiration date stamped on the bottom of my foot.
Whatever other treatments might be under consideration, the first think I would want to know all about is this: What kind of palliative treatment is possible and available when the time comes that I would want that? Depending on all of the relevant circumstances, I just might want to skip the chemo (and any other therapeutic) treatments altogether and just go straight into palliative when I began to feel I really need it.
Yes. I don’t think that I’m going anywhere great when I die (the crematorium is interesting, but not great), so I’d just as soon stay alive if possible.
Chemo may be awful or it may be fairly easy. Either way, I’ll take the chance. If I need to, I can stop and go into hospice.
I have an eight-year-old son, so absolutely. Anything that’s gets me a few more years so that he is in a better position to handle my death, and so that I can help parent him until he is old enough that my husband is in a better position to be a single parent, is good. Also, some research breakthrough could happen in the next two years.
There is a big difference between eight and ten. And eight-year-old still needs someone to be there when he gets home from school. A ten-year-old could take care of himself for a few hours until dad got home from work. It’s not ideal, and naturally, I’d rather watch him grow up. I want to see his bar mitzvah, his graduation, and his wedding. But he’s on the cusp of a new developmental stage-- big kid to “tween,” and that stage makes a big difference as far as getting along with just one parent.
I had a lot of changes in my life in regard to my independence that happened at 9, 10 and 11, with the biggest ones at 11, but some pretty big ones came at 10; I was allowed to take the city bus in Moscow home from my school (it was the embassy school) by myself, and have some time alone is our crowded space (four people, two rooms) that I cherished.
Now, maybe I’d be so sick, I wouldn’t be able to do a lot, but I might be eligible for disability, so we could pay someone to be there with me for a couple of hours a day. I could still offer my son affection and interact with him, and someone else could do the “heavy lifting.”
I said absolutely not, because I am on my own and don’t want to go through chemo or radiation. I would live out the time I had as well as I could. And blow my retirement fund. 
I can say this because I don’t have children or anyone counting on me and I have a role model in my mom who didn’t get diagnosed let alone treated and had ten good years and a relatively quick death.
With a prognosis that poor I’d tend to say I wouldn’t bother.
Now, were I actually faced with that decision, I don’t know if I could predict what I’d actually do.
15% is an infinitely higher chance of survival than “dead within a couple of months”. I’ll take the chemotherapy, thank you.
If the therapy took a long time and I had a lot of tough side-effects, I might change my mind later, though. It would also depend on how the prognosis developed during the treatment.
chemo does have a lot of tough side effects. That’s why I hesitate to say definitively what I’d do.
Absolutely not. I’m 56. I’ve had a great life to this point and would rather not go through any tough times before calling it quits. Last winter I had a heart attack and a stent placed, which was surprisingly simple. I told my cardiologist before the angiography that thoracotomy/bypass was not an option I’d consider.
As others have said, chemo isn’t necessarily all that bad nowadays. My mother’s gone through two rounds, each round being 8 chemo sessions spaced 3 weeks apart. I wouldn’t say they were fun, but they were far from the curled-up-in-fetal-position-puking that is a lot of people’s (mine, included pre-mother-cancer) idea of chemo.
While she was getting the therapy, the week after chemo she’d be very tired and a bit achey, then she’d have a week feeling so-so, then a good week. Rinse and repeat. Once the 8 sessions were over, she’s doing great. It’s a bit scary to think it might come back (well, probably will come back, given the cancer she has) but still, the chemo is much better than the alternative, which was death. She had a good quality of life and is still plenty active and not at all interested in heading to the grave.
As others have said, a fifteen percent chance of living is better than a zero percent chance of living.
Same basic idea here, as the dad of a 7 year old.
Also, I just want to see as much of his life as I possibly can, particularly his growing-up years.
I would probably try the accepted “first-line” chemotherapy for a few cycles to see what the effect and side effects are.
If the side effects were manageable and I got substantial measurable improvement based on either dramatic tumor reduction or improved quality of life I might continue.
But if the side effects were harsh and the results minimal ( and in my experience this scenario is more common that the one I described before ) – I would stop.
And I definitely would not spend the remainder of my life chasing for cures and trying second and third line therapies known for harsher side effects and fewer positive outcomes in the futile hope that THIS might be the thing that works for me, because during the time I was active in cancer support groups I saw dozens of people go down that path and it never worked.
Only if I had a reasonable prognosis and could expect a return to at least a somewhat normal life.
SInce I have a 10 year old with major issues at home, I have a lot of incentive to keep living. I’d definitely do chemo, because my wife would have a VERY time raising our son alone.
15% chances aren’t great, but let’s look at it this way- if you were handed a die and told you’d win a billion dollars if you rolled a 6, you’d take that chance, wouldn’t you? Well, a ROUGHLY one in six chance of living seems worthwhile to me.
I believe I would at least be willing to try chemo for a while. If it proved just too awful I could always stop. I believe my SO would still rather have me than the money I leave behind.