I am truly sorry to hear of your plight. My father had colon cancer that caused a blockage and he had to get a colostomy bag. It winded up being a god sent for me.
I am going to tell you something you will not want to hear and hopefully they are not going to applicable to you. Beyond stage 3 your survival rate drops dramatically. Once it hits your liver the stats say 6 to 8 months with out chemo. Chemo will give you 4 to 6 months longer.
This will be hard to hear but I promise you every person on the earth will experience death. It is just that not all of us will experience life. My father wanted very badly to live. He was so afraid of dying and not once blamed me for not catching the symptoms sooner. In all honesty I should have. I just did not know what to look for, or was to busy doing something I thought was important that in hind sight was not.
He privately told me before he passed that he wished he did not do the chemo. He got very weak, very fast. Did not enjoy food, and found little pleasure in anything he did. His diagnosis was always tugging at him. That bag he had was so helpful to me because without it I would have had to help him to the toilet all the time as my mom could not stomach it. That bag made care a lot more easy. He also had kidney issues requiring injections but he wanted pills. We forced him onto the injections and once we got the pattern down it was not hard to manage.
He remained fairly lucid and strong until about 3 weeks before he died. And the last three weeks were not kind to him. His liver and kidneys failed and thank god I had a good employer because I took 2 months off to care for him and it was a 20 hour a day job. Too little too late. Trips to dialysis, his chemo treatments for 4 hours. Watching him from bringing roofing bundles up a ladder all day to barley being able to steady himself to put on sweat pants was difficult.
My father did take out a policy on himself for my sister and I to help out. And we tried to take his mind off things and do things he always wanted to do but never did. And to this day those things we did while he had cancer that were bucket list things are the memories I cherish most. 700 dollar seats at a giants game, a surprise birthday party, buying a new car, purposely getting a speeding ticket because he knew he would not have to pay it, running up credit card debt because they could not come after him for it, picking fruit, making wine, watching the Giants win in 2012, buying a 68 Camaro driving up the coast, 120 dollar steaks, Lots of other little things..
He had the decency to make it easy on my mom and sister because he did not once complain about it. Enjoy the time you have with your loved ones. Don't dwell on your situation. Listen to your doctors, get a second opinion but don't grab at straws that are not there. Do exactly what they tell you? When they give you good news take it gracefully, when they give you bad news...... don't blame them. Oncologists have crap jobs. There patients die more often than they live. I remember very naively arguing with the doctor about resection and embolization and how the cea markers were down and he was stronger than the week before. I did not want to hear the doctor telling me that the body does that before it really shuts down. Body doing a last push. They see it all the time and they see people like me all the time, looking for trials and experimental treatments, praying and hoping it will go away. They know the science and the time extension a treatment will give you. they know experimental treatments are not to help you , but more to help the people after you 5 years down the road.
Please enjoy your time. Your loved ones will thank you for it.
I hope I am wrong about all of this. But either way take stock of your life reestablish connections with people you got out of touch with, repair broken relationships, and enjoy your life.
I hope you are one of the ones that flips off cancer and the science.
