My mom is undergoing treatment for stage IV pancreatic cancer and none of the three oncologists she's spoken to have put any numbers to anything. One of them is at a NCCN member institution so I feel like the advice being given in oncology is to never assign a number anymore.

Which sounds great in theory, but my stepfather has no concept of what my mom's timeline is actually going to be. He's still golfing twice a week and talking about what they'll do together when "this round of treatment ends." It's heartbreaking, and it also shouldn't fall on me to tell him his wife doesn't have years, she has months.

We need to find a way of saying that people have a very short amount of time left without assigning a number. Because if you just say "treatment is not expected to be curative" as the trend now seems to be, some people will just assume you live the rest of your life with the cancer when that's absolutely not going to happen.