Three months was the shortest, she said, three years the longest. And with treatment? She got mumbly. Finally she said that the longest might not have been that much more than three years. But with treatment, the average should shift toward the longer end. It was a hard and unexpected answer for us. “I didn’t realize,” my father said, his voice trailing off. I remembered what Paul Marcoux, Sara Monopoli’s oncologist, had told me about his patients. “I’m thinking, can I get a pretty good year or two out of this?… They’re thinking ten or twenty years.” We were thinking ten or twenty years, too.
