Though I see your point about "extend," it's likely that the reporter used that term because a cure wasn't certain. I'd say, however, that it wouldn't have been a bone of contention with the docs if they were talking about a few months.
I don't that's necessarily the case. The medical community generally is willing pursue pretty drastic measures for relatively short returns.
When my wife's mother was 82 she very nearly died from an intestinal tumor. After it was removed she got strep from the OR and was on a ventilator for several days. It was a day to day thing. Now, you can imagine how frail she was when she did survive and come home 4 weeks later. The onocologist was in favor of chemo though he said it would improve her long term changes by only approx 20%. She decided (and we agreed) the chemo would kill her at that point before any cancer could re-occur. And ruin the quality of what life she had left.
Well, she turned 85 last month and is in better shape than before the tumor and is really enjoying life. That that would happen was not a given, not even likely. But, it did. And we all are very grateful. And if the cancer comes back right now, she has had a better life since the surgery than she could have had with chemo.
My point here is that they wanted to do chemo with what we considered very poor odds of helping and very high odds of doing just the opposite. One caveat, I was not closely involved so I can't tell you how hard they pushed for chemo, or even if they pushed at all other than suggesting it. But they certainly were willing to do it.