Many people have a misconception and lack of understanding of cancer statistics. The figure you quote of 1.5 years survival after surgery is a median value. It applies to no one individual. It looks at a patient cohort and is based on a percentage of all those in the cohort. One has just as good a chance of falling to the left of the median, on the median or to the right of the median which represents statistical outliers-those that exceed the median value. As a cancer researcher, I understood this and saw no reason why I could not be one of those “statistical outliers”. So after I had the Whipple, I advocated for more aggressive therapy and also took advantage of what precision medicine and targeted therapy had to offer. As a result, I became a “statistical outlier” many times over at 10 1/4 years overall survival and 6.5 years NED of progression free survival.

A very elegant essay was written in the mid 1980’s by Harvard University Computational Biologist Dr. Stephen Jay Gould. It is written to help the lay person understand cancer statistics. I highly recommend it to patients and caregivers alike-

The Median Isn’t the Message
https://people.umass.edu/biep540w/pdf/Stephen%20Jay%20Gould.pdf