Hello all,

I was just curious to know if anyone here has had any experience with family members who have had small cell lung cancer. My mom was diagnosed with extensive stage (or stage 4) SCLC a few months ago -- it has metastasized to her bones and her liver (luckily it is not in the brain yet). No one in my family really knows for sure where to go at this point...it is considered terminal, so the only care that has been recommended is palliative care. This includes chemotherapy as this type of cancer supposedly responds very well to chemo initially, but in almost all cases the cancer grows back.

My mom is on the fence about it all, and while we all have an opinion on what we should do, we all plan to respect whatever decision she makes. Initially, she didn't want to do anything and said she feels any kind of treatment for stage 4 is pointless, but now she does want some relief from her symptoms. She says the worst part aside from all her pain is the fact that she is starving to death but can't eat because the mets to her liver have caused her liver to expand and press on her stomach so that she has no room to eat. The oncologists have said that chemotherapy would shrink the tumors and give her some relief from that for a while... My dad refuses to consider chemo as he feels she will die sooner if she has it -- he demands that she pursue alternative therapies (but it has been a few months since the initial diagnosis and we haven't seen progress yet from anything they have tried). The rest of us see that my mom is getting worse, and we are thinking of encouraging her to do it -- if we wait too long she may not be eligible for chemo anymore. There are also clinical trials that one oncologist said look promising, and I would like her to be eligible for that as well -- but she would have to do the chemo first. Whatever my mom decides to do, I respect her decision 100%. I was just curious to see if anyone else has had any experiences with this type of cancer (or any type of cancer, for that matter).