Just catching up on this thread, but I thought I'd add that my stage 4 talk was quite a bit different,so I hope that brings more comfort to troph.
Mine was basically, we have tools to hopefully stall for a bit but disease progression is pretty serious and our efforts will be palliative and not curative.
It's been two great years since then and we effectively stalled progression for that amount of time, but my body has started to reject the things that were working. My original 5 year survival estimate was 50%. My latest scan showed disease spreading so I asked how that estimate has changed over the last two years. The answer is he's confident in at least another year but realistically things are going to start getting worse though it's hard to anticipate how quickly.
I am going to Asia for two months in March and 3 weeks in Africa in October. I just hope I'm able to stay healthy enough to hit those goals. Past that everything is gravy.