I know a stage 5 cancer patient who now needs a feeding tube. Knowalgable relatives think the patient will not survive the winter. (the cancer is approx 10 years old, and the stage 5 part over a year old).
Probabilities?
sorry for lack of details - I don’t want ayone to have too easy a time identifying the patient.
Stage V cancer means nothing without context, and, in particular, the type of cancer. It is a phrase used to describe a stage in the progression of a particular type of cancer. Many cancer types do not even have a stage V defined.
As for your question, the only person with any insight is a medical professional who is treating the patient.
Si
Are you wrestling with an ethics issue? Do you think the feeding tube and having hope is pointless?
A lot of times, these sorts of questions (such as the OP) are from one probing to hear that all is doomed, so that one can feel better knowing they feel the whole situation sucks and that the patient should move on towards death, have some dignity left and avoid unnecessary treatments, tubes, meds, etc.
You can talk about it here.
Without knowing the type of cancer, its exact staging (TNM or otherwise), more details about the patient’s overall state of health and past medical history, lab values, and past therapies employed, meaningful prognostication is impossible.
Knowledgeable relatives are probably responding to more than just the feeding tube. But being sick enough to not be able to eat is a big thing. It’s a milestone in the decline. It’s not a yardstick, though, so like everyone else has said, you can’t tell how long someone has just from that.
Breast Cancer (female - yes, kids, males also get breast cancer I’m one of those XY’s with a “lumpectomy” scar).
I last saw her in 1999 - she looked fine (she was a couple of years in at that point), still working the farm, et al.
Then I got some pics of weddings last summer. Emaciated, hollow-eyed, with a will to live that won’t quit.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I would want to attend services and do what I could for the survivors - just looking at this a morbid scheduling issue.
[del]There’s really no way to answer this question without more information. We don’t know what kind of cancer she has, how it’s progressed, what the symptoms are, and why in particular she’s on the feeding tube. Being intubated is not a sign on its own that a patient is dying.[/del] Sorry, just saw your second post. It’s still hard to tell and it’s very difficult to be precise about how fast a tumor is going to kill someone. It depends on how the cancer is behaving, what parts of her body it’s affecting, and things like that. If her physical condition has declined a lot lately, there’s reason to assume she doesn’t have long, but it’s hard to predict.
While my dad was dying, a hospice nurse told me that if his health is declining on a month-by-month basis, he probably has months to live, if it is declining on a week-by-week basis, he probably has weeks to live, and if it is declining on a day-by-day basis, he probably has days to live. Kind of obvious, but I had never thought about it that way before, and it turned out to be spot on.