hayleyo wrote:Hi, Mum has now been told she is too frail to have her colon tumour removed. At present she is feeling no symptoms apart from being quite tired. She did ask what stage her tumour was, but no one will answer this question, she asked how long she has left but obviously this is a difficult question to answer. We know her tumour is a large mass around her bowel in a ring like structure and will possibly cause a blockage. It is difficult as we don't know if we are looking at weeks or months before she starts to feel unwell, we have booked a holiday and don't know whether we should cancel it. It is in July, we have no idea how she will be then. We have been told it is a slow growing tumour contained within the bowel, but she has lost so much weight and is only 6 stone (fully dressed.)
Have they done a CT or PET scan to rule out stage IV? Usually they can tell if lymph nodes are involved just from a scan (local lymph node involvement would be a stage III).
The size of the tumor does not determine stage. She could have a very large tumor and still be a stage I with a very positive prognosis.
For rectal cancer, they are doing presurgery chemo now to shrink the tumor before surgery. Some patients, around 20%, have the tumor completely die which is called a complete response. If they are not doing surgery, is chemo an option?
What does she want to do? They said my father was too frail for heart surgery, and he died about a month later. I almost wish now that he had done the surgery and died fighting to live rather than just giving up, but we did not know then that he would only be with us for another month. How long she has has everything to do with how much the disease has already progressed.