My husband was diagnosed with stage 4 EC on 9-1-06 and passed away on 12-7-06. I'm not posting this message to discourage anyone who has this terrible disease but to provide some support or answers to questions on something I may have experienced. My anger is not focused on the fact that my best friend was taken away from me but towards the insurance company who refused to pay for the medicine he needed to control his acid reflux. I feel this contributed to his diagnosis. I do want to share with you some of things that were experienced during his treatment. He was receiving a daily dose of radiation, he was to have 29 treatments and chemo every 4 weeks for 4 days straight. The doctor told him that if his body could withstand this harsh treatment, he might get another year. Unfortunately that didn't happen. The 2 treatments together were more than what his body could take. Since he couldn't eat or drink, he ended up having a Gtube (feeding) put in and was taking in nutrition via a syringe. That didn't work because he was getting too much at once and not enough during the course of 24 hrs and ended up in the hospital for dehydration and a chemical imbalance. So he was hooked up to a pump which provided nutrition during a 24 hr period. He tried to stay positive and fought as hard as he could but pneumonia set in and since the chemo basically killed his immune system, he was much too weak to continue to fight. Prior to all of these events he appeared to be a healthy person weighing about 220 lbs but by the time he lost his battle a couple weeks ago he maybe weighed 120. The most difficult part for me was watching him go through all of this and trying to encourage him to go on. We also need to step back and assess the quality of life that one is going through. From my experience I saw a healthy man who could no longer drive, needed to use a walker, went from being happy go lucky to an angry person and then finally he didn't even have the strength to sit up in bed. So if someone out there needs to vent or cry or just looking for a friend to talk to, I would love to listen.