We know how this story will end, and the only questions are how long it will be in the telling and how nasty it might get.
I have no idea what the answer to the first question might be, other than that it's not likely to be as much as a year. As to the second, I am very reassured by my experience so far with VNS Hospice. (VNS stands for Visiting Nurse Service.)
My pain is controlled so well that it doesn't deserve the name pain. A stitch in the abdomen that occasionally gets a bit sharp but then goes away, sometimes of its own accord, but if not of its own accord then when I take an oxycodone pill.
The tools Hospice uses to control pain are amazing. The oxycodone pills are not the main one. The main one is fentanyl "patches," which are like small strips of scotch tape, a little larger than a postage stamp, that I stick on my chest. I take off the old one and put on a new one every 3 days, and during the 3 days it is on it delivers, through my skin, a steady supply of the opioid in the correct dose to suppress the major part of what would otherwise have been pain.
On top of that, there is a tiny pill of a steroid that I take with breakfast every morning. They tell me it is an important part of the regimen.
Best of all, is the comfort of knowing that the Hospice people are always available to me and fully engaged not only in monitoring the process and ready to make needed adjustments to it, but also in delivering the medications to the door well before they might be needed.
They say that in most cases their pain management continues to work right through to the very end, and I feel I have every reason to believe them.
It is paradoxical but true that I am in better shape today than at any time since the surgery in July 2018 to remove the original tumor. The reason is that the recovery from the surgery was a bit complicated and, when it was far enough along, the chemotherapy began. The side effects of the chemotherapy were never anything like what we all think of when we hear the word ``chemotherapy,'' but there were side effects---sores in the mouth, bleeding in the nose, splitting fingernails, insomnia, some digestive problems immediately after treatment. My last chemotherapy was in July, and these annoyances are gone.
There are two very well known side effects of opioids. One of them is being well handled by the liberal use of laxatives, and the other has not been noticeable, at least not to me. As far as I can tell, my mental processes aren't seriously impaired. Work on my big mathematical treatise continues to progress very well.
(This is the article/book that I reported was finished a few weeks ago. It stopped being finished not because there was anything wrong with it but because I have kept finding better ways to do what I want to do. A few colleagues have made some very helpful comments on the manuscript. Soon it will be finished again. For a while. I have taken no concrete steps toward publication yet, but I plan to take some soon.)
Betty and I are happily isolated from covid-19 in our spectacular apartment (soon coming to the end of our 2nd year in this apartment, two and a half years in this building). Betty has been feeding us very well, managing the whole operation from telephone grocery shopping to dinner on the table, and our intramural Scrabble match remains hotly contested. We marvel at how grateful we are and how happy we continue to be two years and more after my diagnosis.