Proliferative Index

My sister's voice sounded a little shaky when she described what the proliferative index was. "It's how much of the tumor is reproducing itself at once. 80% is high."
I was too caught up in what I had learned about triple-neg. cancer to notice her voice falter. "Usually this kind of cancer hits young African American or Hispanic women. Or women with a BRCA-1 gene mutation. How did I get it? We don't have this in our family."
We finished up our conversation and I began to do more research. I found out that the proliferative index gave the doctors a good idea how well treatment would work on someone and what their chances of recurrence were. 1-10% was good chance of recovery without recurrence; 10-20% was moderate chance of recovery without recurrence; and 20% was poor chance of recovery without recurrence. Anything above 20% was a very poor prognosis: for treatment success and for recurrence. Mine was 80%! No wonder both the doctor and my sister sounded shaky. I was beginning to understand why the doctor did not try to talk me into treatment. He knew my hope of cure was nill and that the treatment might not even prolong my life. Both my husband and I felt that if the doctor had thought I would be helped by conventional medicine, he would have tried to convince me to go for treatment. With what he knew of my personality, he knew I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life doing chemotherapy when it probably would not prolong my life. I was thankful he had the insight and thoughtfulness to let me make my own decision.
We had some decisions to make.