Dear Judy,
My brother-in-law is at home under hospice care. He has prostate cancer which metastasized to the bone. For the past year he’s been in severe pain all over his body.
However — in the last week he’s had no pain at all! No meds have been added or changed. He is very weak and tired and not eating more than 100 calories a day, if that. He gets up and wanders around and hallucinates a lot. His hands and feet are colder than normal for him. He seems to drift in and out of reality.
Does this mean he’s within a few days of dying?
Roland
Dear Roland,
Bone cancer is an especially brutal form of the disease — and I’m so sorry your brother-in-law was in pain for so long. Nonetheless, I’m really surprised, considering he’s under hospice care, that the nurses didn’t up the dosage — or even change the dosage — of his meds. Pain control is what hospice care excels at (usually).
To get back to your central question: medical personnel never have managed to predict the exact date of a patient’s death. I can tell you this though, from my experience as a hospice volunteer: when a patient basically stops eating, or takes in as little as your brother-in-law, death isn’t far off. The body simply no longer requires fuel, and therefore doesn’t crave it.
Hallucinating and wandering too are common precursors of impending death. Those hallucinations may account for a reduction in pain.
So I believe from what you write that yes, death is imminent. But I can’t predict if it will occur tomorrow or within a week.
Thank you for writing
Judy
