So my dad was diagnosed Stage IV pleural back in March and I'm a nurse practitioner so I obviously went down the research rabbit hole immediately. And yeah, the statistics are grim, I'm not going to sugarcoat that. But I also think there's this thing where people google "mesothelioma prognosis" and see median survival of like 12-21 months depending on the study and they think that's a death sentence in the next year.
It's not that simple though. Those numbers include people diagnosed at every stage, people who can't tolerate treatment, people who didn't get multimodal therapy. My dad's on palliative care now since October but he's doing things. He's here. We're managing his symptoms with decent success honestly because I know what to push for and what not to.
The people I've met through his oncology team at Northwestern who did aggressive treatment early, especially the ones who caught it Stage I or II, some of them are at two, three, four years out. One guy's wife posted in a different support group that he hit five years. That's not nothing.
I guess what I'm saying is yes, meso is serious and yes the median is what it is, but if you're newly diagnosed, there's actual variation in outcomes and a lot of it depends on your stage at diagnosis, your functional status, whether you can tolerate multimodal therapy which usually means surgery plus chemo plus sometimes radiation. It's not automatic.
Don't stop fighting just because the numbers look bad. But also be realistic about what fighting looks like for your specific situation.