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I had two friends that died of cancer. Both of them were never told a definite number of how much time they had left. They were both female and both were Stage 4 when diagnosed. Both died around 4 months after diagnosis. It was like the doctors were too chicken to tell them they were terminal.

Both my older brothers are doctors, and one is a cancer surgeon. The other regularly deals with cancers.

Unfortunately, per my understanding talking to them, estimates of how long a terminal patient has left are a terrible crap-shoot at best. We (humanity) simply lack the ability to accurately predict remaining lifespan with any reasonable degree of accuracy.

That said, my understanding is that we (again, in the doctor/humanity sense) are pretty good at determining when something is terminal, and a doctor not saying so is indeed chickenshit.

“it could be 5 days or 15 years.”

This is the sort of situation that keeps one of my brothers up at night, per his own confession- because sometimes this horribly wide degree of prediction is the absolute best modern medicine can provide. It haunts him when he gets such a patient. He loses sleep for weeks at a time when this sort of situation happens, because he knows how horrible and vague a burden it is when he lays this on someone.

When he lays this sort of vague prognosis on someone it eats him up inside, because he knows how horrible it is for his patient and their family, but it's the best he can do... He's a God-fearing family man with a wife and 3 daughters, and you should see what such a vague diagnosis does to him when it's the best he can do...