While you can put one in at any time, my experience in talking to many patients is that they wait until they are already sliding backwards before doing what is needed. What I mean is not just loosing significant lean body mass, they are not healing as well after treatments as they could be with out the proper nutitional intake (you're healing everyday after radiation etc. as your body tries to repair the damage done by the treatments) All this delays ultimate recovery and compromises quality of life. You can heed the advice of some here who have had an easy go of things without mucocitis, (and he may be one of the lucky few who fall into this category) or you can listen to the group like me that could not eat by mouth at all, and refused the PEG until my doctors wouldn't take my no for an answer anymore. In retrospect I should have had it right form the get go. If you end up not using it... so what? If you need it it is there. If he starts losing body weight, it wil not just be fat, it will be muscle mass ie. lean body mass, and that is not a good thing. If he is not taking in the right nutirents because it hurts, tastes like cardboard, or he is too apathetic and sleepy to care about eating, he is still doing damage to the rate at which he will heal. The downside to the PEG is so small. If he drops more than 10-15% of his body weight, a quality institution is not going to let the choice be his, he will be getting one...but instead of losing that nutritional factor for that amount of time, why even go down that path?
