edit: for the remarkably special downvoters (stay classy HN) - that's the type of lung cancer my mother died from, in about 20 months time. You generally can't surgically remove small cell lung cancer. It was particularly brutal, with endless treatment attempts that were physically grueling and minimally effective. It's a highly aggressive cancer with a very low survival rate and few good treatment options. Accordingly, having watched her go through that, I can very much relate to what the parent said.
While I don't usually comment on downvotes, my guess is that the downvotes are because your question can come off as being insensitive. After someone tells you about the tragic death of both of his parents, maybe don't start a guessing game of what his mother died of even if your loved one died of that same disease.
I think this is the take-away. I'm sorry for your loss, and I suspect that it has made this topic much closer and realer for you than many other people. Whereas we are all familiar with insensitive assholes.
It can be challenging to know how to best approach a situation where you think some one is being rude, without also opening yourself up for blame (or verbal abuse), in a calm and constructive manner. Even assuming good faith it would be very easy to see your original un-edited remark as some one curiously gawking at another person's tragedy.
I can see that this situation is upsetting for you. It might help to reframe this by recognizing that calm, thoughtful, and articulate communication is difficult.
This will likely get downvoted also. The issue is it becoming too meta and veering off topic.
I didn't assume anything, and I'm sorry for your loss. But the topic is about how doctors choose to die and it's too off-topic to go into how votes on a particular website are counted.
Small cell lung cancer is what got my mom. She did chemo, radiation therapy, you name it.
In the end, she went into the bathroom, threw up a lot of blood, and never woke up. They didn’t do an autopsy, but the assumption was that the cancer had just gotten too widely distributed throughout her system.
But, since she had spent much of her adult life helping my dad with one or the other of his medical problems, and she had been an HR director at Norman Regional Hospital for many years, she did focus on trying to keep the best quality of life that she could, right up to the end.
The irony was that she had quit smoking thirty years earlier. It was her sister that did her in. Since the sister was in stage 4 of stomach cancer, they let her smoke in her hospital room. And my mom was the primary caregiver who slept in that room and was there pretty much 24x7. So, her second-hand smoke is what got my mom.
Definitely focus on quality of life. Whatever you’ve got left, you should try to make those your best days, weeks, months, or years yet.
edit: for the remarkably special downvoters (stay classy HN) - that's the type of lung cancer my mother died from, in about 20 months time. You generally can't surgically remove small cell lung cancer. It was particularly brutal, with endless treatment attempts that were physically grueling and minimally effective. It's a highly aggressive cancer with a very low survival rate and few good treatment options. Accordingly, having watched her go through that, I can very much relate to what the parent said.