Sorry for more death talk, but it’s important. So please, read this: What Doctors Know — and We Can Learn — About Dying
For me, the most profound paragraph was this:
Doctors also know that undergoing heroic measures is a lousy way to die. They’ve seen what it’s like for an elderly patient to end up in the ICU, hooked up to machines, often semiparalyzed, in pain, lying on what philosopher Sidney Hook called “mattress graves” during his own terminal illness. At a recent meeting I attended, one emergency physician tearfully admitted she didn’t think she could stand to hear the sound of ribs breaking as she performed CPR on yet another elderly patient who almost certainly would not survive.
The article above stemmed from Ken Murray’s piece “How Doctors Die (It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be).” This piece should be required reading for everyone over 12. Now get to it.
