I can sympathize. After a day of tests we were expecting at worst a diagnosis of GERD, and instead were told my husband had stage IV ge-junction cancer with metastasis to the liver and lymph nodes.

Surgery and radiation were not options. Since he was on a fast downhill slide, we pushed to get chemo as fast as possible.

At the low point, he could barely eat and all he could do was lay on the couch all day, getting up only to go to the bathroom. He was so weak that he was walking only 200 to 300 steps a day and had to use a wheelchair in the medical center to get to his appointments.

But after a month with 2 cycles of chemo things started to turn around. At the end of 2 months/4 cycles of chemo, he is functional again; and a CT scan showed a response to chemo with tumors shrinking and no new tumors.

This has been awful and overwhelming. I am sure it would have been even worse if children had been involved. But what I learned is to try not to fixate on the horrors of cancer and the dire predictions of survival rates. Individuals are not statistics, and each is different. Do your best to maintain hope and focus on success stories instead.