Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End in Reading with Style

Aug 30, 2014 Juniper rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: bioethics, medical-lit, memoir, effing-awesome, 2015-books, nonfiction

Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a staff writer for The New Yorker. i have been aware of him and his work for several years now, but this is the first opportunity i have taken to read him. this is a wonderful book - important and necessary, it feels like required reading. gawande writes with warmth and compassion while recognizing the disastrous state of affairs that exists in how our society has evolved to handle dying, death and end-of-life care. (he is fairly U.S. ...more

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Mar 09, 2015 Chinook rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, 2-on-shelves, book-riot-box

This book is incredible. It's well-written and researched and has an incredibly emotional impact. I think readers will all see themselves and their families in this book. It's an incredibly important book to read and contemplate.

Read in Colorado Springs. ...more

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Aug 18, 2014 Claire Jefferies rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, faves-of-2015

This was an impressive book, and one that I would absolutely recommend to anyone, at any stage of life - old, young, healthy or infirm. Atul Gawande's book Being Mortal is about what happens to us when we become too old or too ill to take care of ourselves on our own. How is our society structured to care for this group of people? And are we actually caring for them in a way that supports life, or are we simply giving them a place to stay alive?

Gawande, a doctor himself, spends a lot of time ex This was an impressive book, and one that I would absolutely recommend to anyone, at any stage of life - old, young, healthy or infirm. Atul Gawande's book Being Mortal is about what happens to us when we become too old or too ill to take care of ourselves on our own. How is our society structured to care for this group of people? And are we actually caring for them in a way that supports life, or are we simply giving them a place to stay alive?

Gawande, a doctor himself, spends a lot of time exploring alternatives to nursing homes for the elderly and hospitals for the terminally ill. One of my favorite parts of the book tells the story of an incredibly independent, kooky doctor whose ideas to reform his nursing home include bringing in 4 dogs, 2 cats, and 100 parakeets in order to give his patients something to take care of, and something to live for. I loved reading about Green Houses, or "pods", which revolutionize care for the elderly by providing a balance between competing needs - looking out for their safety while at the same time providing privacy, independence, and the ability to choose what risks they are willing to take and those that they're not.

Much of this book focused on palliative care and hospice, both of which are becoming increasingly more popular in our society. A few years after my own father passed away at 62 from a long, debilitating bout with Multiple Systems Atrophy (a Parkinson's like disease), I found myself wanting to learn more about death and dying and how we deal with these topics in our culture. I went through hospice training when I was 25 - about two years after my father passed away - with every intention of becoming a volunteer, but the grief of losing my dad was still too raw and I pulled away after completing the course. However, learning about hospice care and hearing a nurse talk about the "beautiful death" that she had been a witness to the night before was worth every bit of time I poured into the lengthy training. I'm not grateful that I lost my dad at such a young age, but I am so glad that it allowed me to start thinking and learning about alternatives to traditional medical options and nursing homes early in life. While much of what Gawande wrote about in his book wasn't exactly new information to me, it did confirm my desire to live (and die) in a way that is more aligned with increasing the quality of my life, not extending the quantity of days I have left.

Something I really appreciated about this book was Gawande's willingness to be vulnerable, to admit that as a physician and a surgeon, it is so much easier to try to offer solutions that "fix" patients. That it's much easier to provide "safe" options - aggressive chemo for cancer, experimental drugs for disease, invasive surgery to remove tumors - than to have a frank discussion with patients about whether or not these options make sense for what they want for their lives. Is it always best to take the aggressive route - to keep fighting even when the side effects or time and expense are substantial - or is there a beauty in putting aside the aggression to make way for comfort, closure, and peace while the disease that will inevitably end our life take its natural course? I appreciated that Gawande showed us how he struggled - and struggles still - with talking to patients about how they want to die. I learned so much from his own battle to do what's best, even when it's not always easy, that I know I will apply to my own life and the lives of those I love when the time comes to have these difficult conversations.

I gave this one four stars rather than five only because I came into this already knowing a good bit about hospice and palliative care. For those who know little about this topic, I can see this book being revolutionary. I absolutely suggest that this book become required reading, especially as our elderly population increases and as health care reform changes our national conversations about affordability of our medical care. Truly a fantastic read. ...more

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Aug 24, 2015 Kathleen (itpdx) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: lwv-book-group, non-fiction

An excellent, thought-provoking and kind of scary read for those of us in the senior category. The scary part was the description of how aging impacts us. Gawande looks at end of life medicine and care. The history was very interesting. I had not realized that the reason my grandmothers ended up in nursing homes is because in the 60s and 70s there wasn't much in the way of other options when their care overwhelmed family resources. The author finds a compassionate and practical way of discussing ...more

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