Hugs and purrs -- and I have some very serious medical texts on the
shelf that have chapters on how visualization, self-healing, etc., can
cause beneficial changes in the immune system.

Another way of looking at the situation is that buying time can truly be
important, either because a new treatment becomes available, or the body
uses some of its own healing methods.  For example, I had a quadruple
heart bypass. Within six months of the surgery, two of the bypass grafts
stopped up, and I was again having angina.

As it happened, I was a member of a health maintenance organization that
refused to work up the problem -- it wasn't obvious without additional
tests that the vessels had closed. I found a research program at the
National Institutes of Health, where I've been a volunteer in mostly
diagnostic cardiac methods for over ten years. By then, my heart
ejection fraction, a measure of pumping efficiency, had dropped to
around 35%, just above where congestive heart failure starts. My heart
was enlarging in a not-good way.

They confirmed the diagnosis, but then got very aggressive on using
drugs to relieve symptoms, and, indeed, I am on an exceptionally long
list. As they relieved symptoms, they also gave some previously unknown
good genetics time to work.  My bad genetics had caused coronary artery
disease in my thirties.

I was kept healthy long enough for my heart to "recollateralize itself",
where normally microscopic blood vessels in the heart muscle enlarged,
essentially a do-it-yourself bypass. The heart enlargement went back to
normal, and my last ejection fraction, about a year ago, was 65% -- the
lower edge of the athletically conditioned range.

The rate of introduction of new and effective cancer treatments is
shocking even to experienced scientists. Some of the newer breast cancer
treatment studies are now beginning not to talk remission, but cure.
Previously quickly lethal childhood leukemias have a 70% or better
complete cure rate.  

One bone tumor type, osteogenic sarcoma, tends to be a disease of
adolescents or young adults. It is fairly distinctive on X-ray.  I've
read some poignant autobiographies of physicians in the 1930s and 1940s
diagnosing it in a colleague, and, while the words were never said out
loud, prescribing a supply of narcotics that would be lethal if taken at
the same time.  

Treatment did improve somewhat, so that there was a chance with
immediate amputation, far above the tumor. Osteogenic sarcoma near the
ankle might call for mid-thigh amputation.

Today, it's often curable, controllable quickly, and may need no surgery
at all.

This kind of progress is not science fiction. There are no guarantees,
but there is every reason to believe that improved treatments will be
available to you in the time you have gained. Getting involved in
research programs is often a good idea.