QUESTION: As toxins build in the body because your body isn’t working right anymore, what signs are there that you are shutting down? Stage 4 liver disease, hepatitis C.

I cannot give you lab values or medical interpretations as to note that a body is shutting down. There are too many individual variations for me to make a blanket statement plus I do not know the specific details of your disease progression. I can, however, give you non medical guidelines that point to approaching death which apply to everyone--with any disease or with just old age. When death is nearing the body loses its ability to function normally due to disease taking over the body and interfering with its ability to live. Then three things start happening:

*A person’s eating habits change. They eat less and less over a period of several months before death occurs.
* A person starts sleeping more and more. Again, gradually, over a period of months, until they finally do not have the energy, desire, or ability to get out of bed.
* A person starts losing interest in what is happening in the world around them, gradually withdrawing completely, to do inward processing. Words become less important. Touch and presence have meaning.

The process to dying a gradual death from disease begins in the months before death. Changes begin to happen in the areas of food intake, sleep, and social interaction. Assess those three areas and you can determine if the person has entered the dying process and whether they have months, weeks, days, or hours to live. The closest we can get with our prediction of life remaining is months, weeks, days, and hours.

To determine if a person has months, weeks, days, or hours to live we need to look at how little they are eating, how much they are sleeping and how withdrawn they are from their world.

These guidelines are not set in stone, but occur consistently enough in most people that they can be used to predict the length of time someone has left to live. Most people will exhibit at least some changes in these three areas.