Tag: end of life

Letting go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?

Tells several of the wrenching stories from his book (Being Mortal), making points about medicine’s reluctance to stop treatment and acknowledge the patient is dying, even when the chance of improvement is slim to none. “Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions–and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left.” 13 pps; suitable for undergrads, professional students, maybe medical students; describes hospice treatments and misconceptions about hospice.

Intoxicated by My Illness, and Other Writings on Life and Death

The link is a review by J. Russell Teagarden of a book by Anatole Broyard, who died of prostate cancer but used his illness as a way to reflect on literature and illness (and literature and medicine). Teagarden explains that the book is “a collection of writings concerning illness and death, mostly his, and in particular, the metastatic prostate cancer that took [Broyard’s] life at age seventy.” The book is not a chronology of Broyard’s illness but, instead, a collection of his New York Times articles, his notes and early drafts of writings, and a talk he gave at the University of Chicago medical school.

Two subjects in particular might be used in a class. One is an approach to thinking about terminal illness. As Teagarden explains, “The book begins with the first of many counterintuitive notions Broyard offers when he refers to being intoxicated by his illness. With the diagnosis, he ‘is filled with desire—to live, to write, to do everything. Desire itself is a kind of immortality.’ (p. 4) Broyard is not just intoxicated by his illness; ‘I’m infatuated with my cancer.’ He is not doomed as much as he is freed; ‘I can afford now, I said to myself, to draw conclusions.’ (pp. 6-7). Likewise, the idea of meeting death with style is a theme across the book.

The book also addresses the relationship between literature and illness; as Teagarden states, “he considers the literature of illness, the literature for illness, and the literature of death.” The book includes passages in which Broyard tells the story of his illness, and the story of his father’s illness (both died of prostate cancer).

Think you want to die at home? You might want to think twice about that.

This graphic medicine opinion piece by a professor of medicine and palliative care complicates the belief that a death at home is less expensive or more satisfying than death in a hospital. The author recounts conversations he has had with home caregivers about the burdens of complicated care regimes; the physical, psychological, and economic costs, and the systemic incentives to shift care to home caregivers who may be ill-equipped.

This short piece is useful for discussions about end of life care, both the personal burden for caregivers as well as the systemic and economic incentives. It includes brief quotations from caregivers the author has worked with as well as statistics about end of life care in the US.

Hello, Goodbye

Steve Jobs’ last words were: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” Oscar Wilde went with: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” (At least, that’s how the story goes.) But the way most of us part company with language at the end of our lives is more halting and gradual. Even when a dying loved one is unable to speak clearly, other forms of communication often take over: noises, gestures, touch and eye contact. We have stories in this episode from a hospice nurse, from journalists covering mental health and internet culture, and from language writer Michael Erard who is writing a book about last words and their relationship to first words. The author mentioned in the abstract talks about “biological death” vs “social death” and how living people are involved in both. Dying alone seems like the definition of a “bad death,” which led him to write the book about last words – even though they aren’t usually any more profound or meaningful than first words. This is a linguistics-focused podcast so there’s an orientation to language acquisition that will make this useful to a language class – Spanish or English – without being too distracting for a non-language class.