This one hit home. I lost my mother about four months ago to lung cancer (Catters! If you are smoking, STOP, please!) she lived 2 years after finding out about it and made some very good decisions along the way: don't try surgery, don't do chemo, try radiation while understanding that it shrinks the tumor and won't make it go away altogether. After about a year and a half the tumor started growing again, she went into a hospice program and I moved back in down there, in the same room I had while I was growing up (!) about a month later I needed to hire somebody to be with her during the day while I was at work. As she got weaker she saved her strength to do the things she most wanted to do which mainly were to continue teaching piano, and spend time with me and with her grandchildren. Three weeks before she died she went to see her middle granddaughter graduate from college; she gave her last lesson (but didn't know it) ten days before she died, a week before she went with me to a music party, came home from that and didn't get out of bed again. When she died it was just the two of us-- that last week I spent about an hour a day singing gospel songs to her knowing things were close. At home, no tubes, no IVs, and most of all no fluorescent lights! I'm all for modern medicine when they can do something to help you (or even when the odds are worth trying) but she made it very clear she didn't want 'heroic measures" and all in all aside from not being able to persuade her to stop smoking 30 years ago, I have very few regrets but miss her badly. Art-- glad you came OUT of the hospital. They can be places where good things happen. But I'm glad Mom made it clear that she didn't want to be in a hospital cause that made my decisions a lot easier.