My mom is 51 and has stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. It's spread to her spine and brain. Her doctors also diagnosed her with leptomeningeal carcinamatosis.
I know it's a rare type of cancer and is almost always terminal.
It can have severe symptoms such as acute blindness as well as deafness.
Has anyone here had experience with this in a loved one?
Did your loved one pass from it? How long did it take? What went first? What symptoms did they display?
My mom can no longer walk on her own and is wheelchair bound. I also suspect her eyesight is beginning to go as well.
Excerpt from Medscape:
The median survival is 7 months for patients with LC from breast cancers, 4 months for patients with LC from small-cell lung carcinomas, and 3.6 months for patients with LC from melanomas.
•Without therapy, most patients survive 4-6 weeks, with death occurring because of progressive neurologic dysfunction.
•With therapy, most patients die from the systemic complications of their cancer rather than the neurologic complications of LC.
•Fixed focal neurologic deficits (eg, cranial-nerve palsies) generally do not improve, but encephalopathies can improve dramatically with treatment.