Haha you're most certainly not the only one! I met the most amazing woman 4 months ago and she didn't run away like I was expecting when I told her about my condition. Instead she has went above and beyond to be as helpful and supportive as possible, I would have married her already but I am waiting to see how things go financially.

If medical bills end up being overbearing there's no point in making her legally responsible for my debt on the off chance I don't pull through.

All I know is that she came into my life at the perfect time before I even knew I needed her. I am blessed I have her to support me through this difficult time.

Thanks man!

My mother is stubborn af too.... it's a trait that has it's advantages and disadvantages unfortunately.

I lost my mother to lung cancer a few years ago, and she was... well, I wrote a bit below about the strange things she did in her last couple of months. Dunno, there was nothing to be done for her at that point, and I think what she did kept her mind off the inevitable. That was worth something, IMHO.

I had some ideas about what she ought to be doing, and they differed from her ideas, but she was the one looking death in the eye, and in the end it was up to her. I tried to argue with her, once, about some diagnostics I wanted her to take, and when she became very upset I stopped, and never argued with her again.

Dunno- the CBD might have made her more comfortable, and it might not have. It wouldn't have changed the course of her disease. While it's natural to want to second guess every decision you made when you lose someone that close to you, I have come to understand that it's not worthwhile.

We want to feel as if we have some control over events, so when a really bad event that is completely out of our control happens we invent things that we could have done to make it better. We'd rather feel that we did something wrong than just acknowledge that there was nothing to be done. If we had just done this instead of that, maybe it would have been a bit better... somehow it's more comforting to blame ourselves than to recognize that sometimes very bad things happen, and we can do nothing about them.

It has taken me years to understand that about how my mother died. For years I second-guessed myself, wishing I had gotten there sooner, wishing I had not had certain conversations with her that upset her, wishing, wishing, wishing. In the end, I realized, I was just wishing she hadn't gotten sick, wishing she'd lived to be 100, instead of 66.

In the end, after a long time, I came to recognize that I did everything that could have been done. I was with her at the end, and there wasn't much else I could have done, except let her do what she wanted to. But it took a long time for me to really come to peace with that.

Thank you!

Absolutely, I myself am a betting man. I have good odds of making it through this by far. I know exactly what you mean by the numbers, I've already looked into them and found the same thing. It's just grouped together by diagnosis for the statistics, age definitely is a big factor that boosts my odds dramatically.

Honestly your response was one of most naturally formed ones so far, I blame the booze lol. But yeah man honestly I feel like depression and anxiety and things of that nature are more of a mindset type thing.

I'm by no means trying to discredit them as serious issues because I have seen how they can effect people, and I have been through them both. We all experience it at some point to a certain extent. With depression though especially I feel like its the quicksand out of all types of mentality. The harder you try to fight it off the faster it pulls you back under....

Yes it can be defeated, not always easily or quickly but it can be done. I feel like its similar to fighting addiction, you may not want that last line you did but your body or your mind told you to do it anyway. If you say "no, I don't need it" for long enough it slowly gets easier to not even be a thought. It's similar with the negativity from depression, you try to be happy but you just can't sometimes no matter what you try.... or you do get to be happy for a little bit and then something happens that triggers the negative again. Its not that you want to think about that dark shit that makes you unhappy your mind just does it against your will. You have to learn how to fight it off to the best of your ability repeatedly and eventually it is easier to be a positive person IMO.

As far as anxiety, I feel like this is more common and more related to fear of the outcome that may happen, even if its a completely made up outcome you concocted out of thin air that is 99.9999% not plausible given the current situation... but that 0.00001% is all it takes to make you think of it. It's pretty common in people that overthink because they are usually more intelligent that the more active people like athletes and people of that nature, they exercise their physical muscles while others exercise their mental muscles. Its hard to just shut off your brain and stop thinking, some times impossible.... Thus where the positive mentality can help out as well.

My philosophy is try not to overthink to the point of ridiculousness and if I notice I am doing it I find something to take my mind off of whatever I am overthinking.

If I am anxious about something I prefer the phrase "Fuck it, lets do it." Positive mind and just go for it if you even think about doing it and can see the good from it. I would rather look back on my life and say "Yeah, I did a lot of shit and enjoyed my life to the best of my capabilities." Than look back and go "Damn... I wish I would have done more things I wanted to do...."

Sorry for the run on... I hope this helps you in some way!

There may be a better way that has not yet been discovered but hokum like the diet above or some mysterious super food that big pharma doesn't want you to know about isn't going to be it. Please talk to your doctor before pursuing any non-traditional treatments. Regardless, godspeed with everything, I hope to see an update showing that you kicked its ass.

I don't think anything is being intentionally hidden away for financial reasons. My mother died of lung cancer a few years ago. Unfortunately, she had a type that does not generally have a good prognosis unless it is caught early enough that surgery is an option. It rarely is, and wasn't in her case. So she opted to forego treatment, as it would have been quite unpleasant, and would have been very unlikely to do more than prolong things a bit.

She went to my sister's place to die, and I went there for the last week (the end came very suddenly, more suddenly than we had expected.) My sister was a grad student in the biology department at Texas A&M at the time. Her field was neuro-bio, so not related to cancer, but A&M is a big research University, with a strong biology department. I was there for a few days after my mother died, and my sister's friends from the department came over a couple of times to bring us food, and offer her support. Some of them were very involved in cancer research (including a close friend of hers who had lost her father to cancer a few years before.)

There was a limit to what they could say about their research (even public University research departments guard certain things a bit more than I would like) but I can tell you this: they had a sense of mission about their work, and seemed to think that what they were working on was likely to bear some fruit, though not for some time. And, of course, even developing a treatment for a single type of cancer that significantly improved outcomes would be enough to make your professional reputation. So I can promise you that they would not allow any significant result they worked on to be buried. The same, I think, is true of researchers in private industry.

Now, what is true is that research dollars in the pharmaceutical industry do tend to flow toward new drugs, as that is what those companies do. And science does have blind spots. It is possible that some things like ketogenic diets, etc, might be associated with statistically significant improvements in outcomes, for certain cancers, and that it might take quite a while for the medical establishment to establish that. But you can be certain that if any of them were "cures" we would know by now, because anything with a very high success rate would be noted.

My mother was a practitioner of traditional Chinese Medicine (and a licensed hypno-therapist,) a direct disciple of the head of one of the older Qi Gong lineages, and generally a bit new-agey (that's a bit of an understatement, tbh.) I know, from quite a lot of observation, that she was able to help some people with chronic pain that traditional medicine could not help. While she attributed that to flows of Qi, I attribute that to the fact that she was an extraordinarily persuasive person, and very good at inducing a placebo effect. I'm also glad to say that she always encouraged her patients with signs of serious underlying disease to seek out Western medicine. I think what she did was quackery, but it was, IMHO, worthwhile quackery.

In her last months she sought out some bizarre treatments, including a stint at a Seventh Day Adventist retreat where they attempted to cure her cancer with applications of scaldingly hot towels, a strict vegetarian diet, and lots of prayer. In the end they discharged her, because they had been unable to bring her around to their view of the Universe, and figured that without faith nothing else they were doing would help. She did some other weird things too. I didn't object to any of them, because I knew from the first time I talked to her oncologist that her prognosis was very poor- people very occasionally just spontaneously remit, but that's very rare, and absent that she was going to die. Her pursuit of quackery was a comfort to her, I think, and I don't think it did her any harm.

You're in a different position. You're young, otherwise healthy, and your cancer is generally very treatable, and has good outcomes more often than not. Keep an open mind, but... well, my Mom is not the only new-agey person close to me I've seen die of cancer, and was not the only person I've seen pursue non-traditional treatments that claimed very high success rates. None of them were helped. There are a lot of quacks out there, some of them well-meaning, and some of them more out for the money than Big Pharma at its most avaricious.

I had to have my cat euthanized on Thursday as a result of complications from GI Lymphoma. I don't mean to compare a cat to a human being, but I loved that cat, and was pursuing treatment options until something went very wrong on Wednesday, and I thought it just too much for her to take anymore. Being me, before that I had researched the hell out of the options, outcomes, etc, and every time I googled I got ads promising a natural cure for lymphoma in cats. And you know... as much as I knew these were ads placed by hucksters, there was a part of me that wanted to believe that they had the all-natural cure for cat cancer.

So I'm sorry if I've written you a treatise, but I've been through the wringer with cancer over the last decade. It has taken a lot of the people I loved most, and I've watched some of them pursue very exaggerated and very empty promises. I'm not going to call you lucky, cause it absolutely sucks that you developed a serious cancer at such a young age- that's the exact opposite of lucky. But if you had to get a cancer, at least you got one that can be treated, and has generally favorable outcomes.

You sound like a very sensible young man, so this is probably unnecessary advice, but I'd urge you to be very careful when it comes to things that sound too good to be true, and clear everything through your oncologist. They might have blind spots, and might even be wrong about some things, but they are your best hope, and in your case they are a good hope indeed. I know the lure of the exaggerated promise, and I would hate to see you worsen your chances in its pursuit. Anyway, you have my best wishes and sympathies.

CNN reporting on something is not validation of its scientific accuracy, they are simply reporting on a study and not the quality or accuracy of said study. I'm not even sure how to respond to the fact that you use random Youtubers to inform your medical opinion. Either way I'm done posting after this simply because it'll derail this thread. Feel free to message me if you'd like to continue the discussion.

You can disagree all you want but you are still wrong. But hey, it's your funeral if you're ever in that position.