"Once you come up with a few items that bring comfort and involve the senses, it becomes easier to construct an individualized plan to share with those who are near and dear to our hearts."
"To be 'death positive' doesn’t mean that you are happy about dying."
"One facility used the term “provider-hastened death” and stated that it encompasses euthanasia."
"Whose wishes for his medical treatment were we to honor? Those of my father back when he was a healthy, highly functioning geneticist? Or those of the simpler, weakened man my father had become?"
"If these five reasons don’t make a strong enough case for physicians to engage with their patients in advance care planning, here’s one more: it is simply the right thing to do."
"There should be a JLMA form: Just Leave Me Alone, for those of us who concede that we’re actually going to die some day and work to keep our end-times as inexpensive and comfortable as possible."
“Your mother didn’t choose a terminal illness. She only chose not to let the disease pick when and how she would die.”
"What is fundamentally the difference between a doctor pulling a plug on a machine that provides lifesaving nutrients to a person that could potentially stay 'alive' on it for years, and a doctor prescribing pills to a person with mere days or months to live to end their unnecessary suffering?"
"I was reluctant to force the issue. What remained unsaid came with its own set of consequences."
Most view dementia as a person leaving them. But they’re not. They’re evolving into a new person, similar but not exact. Their capacity to perform tasks and retain memory of recent events doesn’t disqualify them from continuing to be loved and treated with dignity and respect, especially when the end is near.
