Medicine Lake. Photo: Uli Harder / fickr CC.
Being mortal
Alistair Heslop and Elizabeth Redfern consider a moving exploration of illness and death
Anyone who has a parent, or hopefully two, who are, let us say, getting on a bit, or are themselves in their later years, should find Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, written by American doctor Atul Gawande, compulsory reading.
The book provides – through heartening, interesting, saddening and also delightful real life stories – what happens to us when we approach death, or certainly the last years of our life. It includes the story of what happened when the author’s own father approached death, as well as people the author treated.
Our Friend Liz Driscoll brought a copy of the book to our small ‘home-based’ Meeting for Worship in Towcester. She said that her granddaughter – who is in her third year at medical school – had been encouraged to read it by one of her tutors. Being impressed, the granddaughter passed it on to her grandma, who, also impressed, encouraged the rest of us to read it. For us, both in our fifties, it has been a sobering and very enlightening reminder of our roles in the lives of our widowed mothers, both of whom are well into their eighties.
The author emphasises how, due to huge strides in medical science, the medical profession seems to focus solely on keeping the patient alive and offering hope, irrespective of the impact on the patient’s quality of life. The stories related by Atul Gawande in the book tell of individuals whose final months and years are not improved by being offered another, and another, medical treatment, when the reality is that it is time to stop treatment and provide a different type of care. In fact, the stories bear out that there is often no impact on the length of life, nor a significant improvement in the quality of life.
We are encouraged in the book to talk more to our elderly parents, or anyone else who has been diagnosed with what could be a terminal illness, and find out what they really want to do for the rest of their time. We are also asked to consider how hospice care at home could be far more comfortable than treatment and, potentially, death in a hospital. The author describes some informative cases where understanding a person’s view of what makes a life worth living can inform medical decisions now and in the future. In one case it was: ‘As long as I can eat ice cream and watch football on the television, life will be worth living.’
As relatives and friends, we are encouraged to have these conversations and to appreciate that even though we may be in a position of control, especially with elderly parents, we need not think that must include ensuring our nearest and dearest’s ultimate safety.
Even in infirmity, we need to let people ‘Live Life Adventurously’!
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande is published by Profile Books at £8.99. ISBN: 9781846685828.
