That reminds me. A loved one died of cancer. All involved would have preferred that they died in 6 months instead of 2.5 years. Because the final 2 years of their life was filled with painful treatment that left everyone involved stressed, anxious, and saw a loved one slowly decline.

Optimizing for those extra 2 months is not a goal we should be striving for.

There have been some really interesting articles around this on here in the past, particularly around medical doctors dying. If you Google “How doctors die Hacker News” you get a lot of good threads. Here are two I found interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852625

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5104430

I’m sorry to hear of your loss and that experience. This is an important discussion. A while back Peter Attia had a guest who spoke to this. Their stance was we aren’t aggressive enough about what we consider “success” especially if those last two months are spent shuttling back and forth to painful treatments.

I'm sorry, but who in this scenario was forcing them to receive the treatments?

Fair question.

The problem is as patient's we've never gone through the experience before and are totally unprepared for what it's going to be. From the beginning all we know is that path A ends too soon, and path B has a chance of having a good outcome. We hope beyond what's rational that path B will have an exceptional outcome for us and go down that path. Only later do we realize how painful and miserable the experience can be for everyone.