End Stage Colon Cancer
by TeresaR
(Fayetteville, NC)
I'm trying to find out what the symptoms are for the timeline in end stage colon cancer. My mother has stage 4 colon cancer and has rejected treatment. I can find nothing about the "this happens, and then this happens, and then that happens." I found something like that for brain tumors, but not colon cancer.
She has hospice coming in, but refuses to let any of us talk to the hospice caretakers, or to her doctor. I think she doesn't want us to know she rejected treatment, and thinks we won't figure it out.
And because she refuses this talk with her doctors, it means I cannot get FMLA from my employer, and am now considering a leave of absence. I'm trying to "Time" it because I can't survive without money for that long of a period of time. We speak on the phone, and she seems to be pretty open about her symptoms.
Her belly hurts all the time, her bowels have been liquid for more than 2 months. It only moved into her liver this last week, and she's hinting at 2 weeks maybe? I don't know. She eats nothing but meat, and when she eats it, it's less than a 3 or 4 bites, and she tolerates about 1 can of ensure per day. Other than that, she's been living off fruit juice for most of the last month. She's getting weaker and beginning to take a lot of naps. She can no longer sit straight up - she must lean back to take the weight off. Her conversations have always been screwy, so it's hard to tell about that now (she has been repeating the same stories multiple times a day for about 3 or 4 years now).
She lives alone and has hospice 3 times per week now, and a friend who comes every other day. She says she wants to do this "By herself", but refuses to stop and think that if she doesn't get someone to stay with her, she'll end up in a nursing home when she dies (she wants to die at home). So if I could time out the end using her symptoms, I could maybe time out some time off from work and be there for her.
And this isn't fair, the "Capche" code for me is my most unfavorite football team. How did they know?
