Ups and Downs

Nearly everyone at Duke goes out of their way to be as positive as possible around all patients. Every doctor, nurse, and secretary here has assumed the best outcome will happen for me. There are exceptions everywhere. Here, I found one person - a very tall older blonde with terrible posture - who, in her effort to be positive kinda said the opposite. Her comment to me was how lucky this didn't happen ten years ago because breast cancer and especially lung cancer used to be an automatic death sentence and now I could live several years with them. This is not what I want to hear. I do not plan to live with cancer several years. I want to live past the cancer recovery for many years. If I had to choose between living with cancer, just delaying the inevitable by a few very painful and expensive years, I would certainly choose not to.