Hard to answer all of your questions without more info but as he progresses thru the Dx more will most likely be answerable.

You will hear this a lot and that is we all can respond differently to the same or similar treatments but again let's wait until we know exactly what's planned for him.

Re the smoking...you need to tell him that if he continues to smoke he will die. Period, end of his life. We have never had a poster, to my knowledge, on this site that smoke during or post Tx that has lived to tell about it and they die in a short period of time in the most gruesome way. Tobacco is what has caused his cancer and stopping it now while continuing to smoke will not prevent it from recurring and since he has shown a propensity of the tobacco to cause cancer in his body then he's playing with a bomb that will explode. Smoking with the stress excuse it just that, an excuse to continue a deadly habit. Getting him to stop using tobacco is just as important as killing his cancer. Doing either one without the other is useless.