“Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” by Atul Gawande
If you have older parents, or you will someday be an older person, you need to read this book.
This book shaped and informed our approach to Dad’s last days in March of this year. We could have asked to have him admitted to the hospital to try IV antibiotics to fight the infections that were poisoning his body, and he could have lived a few more days, weeks, or maybe months, in the hospital. He would not, in all likelihood, ever been well enough to be discharged to home again, so he would have died in the hospital too. And we would have spent those days, weeks, or months, sitting with him so he would not be alone at the end. Mom, of course, would not have `been able to be there as much.
Alternately, we could not send him to the hospital and let the infections end his life at home, which is what we did. One of us sat with him from Thursday to Monday as he slipped away. Mom kissed him goodbye in the wee hours and he took his last breaths and died, hand in mine. He agreed with the decision, but I doubt if we would have made it had we not all read this book.
Modern medicine seems to stress “Doing everything we can to extend life,” but sometimes, the path of wisdom is in “Doing everything we can to extend comfort." The hospital would have extended his life. Staying home extended his comfort.
“In Being Mortal, author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.
Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.’” from GoodReads.
