You can easily compare the metastatic liver cancer end symptoms to your beloved snowman melting away in front of your eyes…
It’s already bad enough that modern health care isn’t able to detect metastatic liver cancer symptoms early. Doctors don’t prepare you for the deterioration of the liver cancer patient either….
All the information we got from our GP:
- father has 3 to 6 months to live, make sure to focus on "quality of life"
- he will get more pain, so you will have to give more painkillers
- painkillers make a person constipated, so you will have to monitor that as well and react accordingly
Sounds easy, but reality is far different. And notice, the specialists said nothing about this, although one specialist said: it’s easy for us to say things between the 4 walls of a hospital, you guys will have to make it work outside now… So we were blessed to have a good and experienced GP.
Quality of life
Father has 3 to 6 months to live…
But each day of those, his health will be worse than the previous one. It’s difficult to talk about "quality of life" when our most important priority in life is health.
The pleasure of eating together is another joy in our family. Unfortunately the liver tumors are using up vital space in the belly region, so father only managed to eat small portions.
To make things worse (yes, it just doesn’t get any better anymore: that’s the reality of metastatic liver cancer): the tumor also uses up energy provided by the already smaller food intake. Loosing weight and strength are the direct consequences.
Pain has a function
Of course you don’t want to feel the pain caused by the liver pressing on your other organs.
But by suppressing that pain, you also suppress the normal pain reaction you will get when you feel constipated. In other words: you have no clue whether you are constipated, or you just haven’t been eating enough to go to the toilet…
There you are: being a non medical loved one having to make decisions you don’t have a clue about…
The brain starts playing tricks on the liver cancer patient
This was actually the worst of the worst. The liver is not cleaning the blood properly and from time to time messages in the brain don’t get through.
Sometimes father answered a question you asked him the day before. That’s good because you can still figure out the logic.
On other moments you couldn’t figure out the logic anymore. Luckily mom knew father the best and she managed much better to find logic in all what father was saying and doing.
But there was no logic when father started hitting a huge spider at the end of the bed that nobody else saw…
If you want to compare what is happening, then think about people that are in the dessert, deprived for water for a few days and starting to hallucinate.
The body becomes weaker
We had to start helping father physically as his strength was getting less and less. This is where mother ruptured the ligaments in her shoulder. We had some problems with our back, but compared to metastatic liver cancer, a little pain in the back is ridiculous actually.
Summarized
The best way to describe the end symptoms of metastatic liver cancer is to imagine a snowman melting away in the sun…
Yes – one of the things my husband enjoyed in life was his food. Once the cancer took over his enjoyment was severely diminished as he could no longer tolerate the after-effects of eating. He was plagued with major gas and stomach pain. After every meal he would retreat to the bedroom and wait for the gas & pain that eventually came.
As for the confusion – as Billy reached the last weeks of his life, he became so loopy. And this was from a man who would pore over things in a methodical and logical way. It was heartbreaking to see his mind become muddled and he would repeat things over and over again. I tried to break into his confused state of mind by trying to get him to focus but he would just keep saying things over and over again. I think his pain medication contributed to his poor mental state too.
The hardest part of this all was that my husband eventually had to use diapers because of his erratic bowel movements. Towards the end, I would help him to the bathroom, wait while he struggled to move his bowels and then help him put another diaper back on. He was also had ascites which caused him the shakes and tremors. All in all, it was not pleasant for him.