| Friday, April 01, 2005 |
| How We Die |
This book may seem a bit macabre. But in light of:
1: Terry Schiavo
2: The Pope
3: Prince Rainier
4: My grandfather (1 year ago)
5: The step father of one of my nurses (who passed today in a nursing home after a long decline)
6: And most tragically, the wife of my cousin, who, after a 3 year struggle with brain cancer, went home last weekend at Easter to be with her family for a few more days/weeks. She will leave behind my wonderful cousin Royce (aka "Moose"), a 41 year old widower and a beautiful 4 year old daughter who never really knew her mother as anything other than sick and disabled.
I will post about Mary separately because she and Royce deserve that, and it's an amazing love story, but I want to focus on this realistic and factual book.
I bought / read it when it first came out due to both my admiration for Dr. Nuland and my professional interests, but I highly, highly recommend this book to everyone. It is a wonderful, factual, matter of fact, yet sensitive book about the biological process that we will eventually all go through.
I did my post graduate thesis work on the availability and access to healthcare resources for AIDS patients. Inevitably, I made a lot of close friends during the course of my research, and subsequently went to a lot of funerals for a lot of people in the late 80's and early 90's when HIV/AIDS was a death sentence. It was one of the most personally rewarding and heartbreaking periods of my life. This book highlights the fact that we will ALL go through the death process in one form or another - although the circumstances might be different.
Disease, not death, is the real enemy, he reminds us, despite the facts that most deaths are unpleasant, painful, or agonized, and to argue otherwise is to plaster over the truth. The doctor, Nuland stresses, should instill in dying patients the hope not for a miraculous cure but for the dignity and high quality of the remainder of their lives as well as of what they have meant--and will continue to mean--to family, friends, and colleagues. Nuland also has strong feelings about suicide and "assisted death": the doctor should be prepared psychologically and practically to help the longtime patient slip off the scene in relative comfort. Amen. |
posted by Broadsheet @ 7:41 PM   |
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