I highly recommend Being Mortal by Dr. Atul Gawande, a Bostonian surgeon. Its amazing how similar disability issues are, whether you are 9 or 90. It reminds me how disability advocates sometimes say that people without a disability are only Temporarily Able-Bodied. We all will face these challenges at some point in our lives. Here are some of my favorite quotes: The pressure remains all in one direction, toward doing more, because the only mistake clinicians seem to fear is doing too little. Most have no appreciation that equally terrible mistakes are possible in the other direction — that doing too much could be no less devastating to a persons life. A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape ones story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyones lives. Technological society has forgotten what scholars call the dying role and its importance to people as life approaches its end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be okay. They want to end their stories on their own terms. This role is, observers argue, among lifes most important, for both the dying and those left behind. And if it is, the way we deny people this role, out of obtuseness and neglect, is cause for everlasting shame. Over and over, we in medicine inflict deep gouges at the end of peoples lives and then stand oblivious to the harm done.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 05:15:13 +0000
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