Facing death, heroically!

Imagine you are the mother of a eight year old son and a five year old daughter. Imagine that you had this conversation with your doctor:

"Well you know," he said, "this is mostly palliative care. If we didn't do any chemo, you'd begin to have some very unpleasant symptoms soon. So I guess we'd be hitting a single if it acted enough to make you comfortable for a while. A double would be if it actually shrank your tumors some. And a triple -- which is very unlikely -- would be if we were still standing here six months from now talking about what to do next." Apparently a home run was not an option.

How would you face the situation? Here is how Marjorie Williams faced it. The extract ends with this poignant sentence:

I became a professional patient. And all my doctors learned my name.