Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

by Atul Gawande

I believed then that Mr. Lazaroff had chosen badly, and I still believe this. He chose badly not because of all the dangers but because the operation didn’t stand a chance of giving him what he really wanted: his continence, his strength, the life he had previously known.

His oncologists, radiation therapists, surgeons, and other doctors had all seen him through months of treatments for a problem that they knew could not be cured. We could never bring ourselves to discuss the larger truth about his condition or the ultimate limits of our capabilities, let alone what might matter most to him as he neared the end of his life. If he was pursuing a delusion, so were we.

"If he was pursuing a delusion, so were we." WOWOW why is it that so often the medical professionals - the ones who are put on god-like pedestals, have the hardest time admitting their limits. Their shortcomings. Their failures. And how so often it is their patients who feel the burden of this.

There’s no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that we are all aging from the day we are born.

If your problem is fixable, we know just what to do. But if it’s not? The fact that we have had no adequate answers to this question is troubling and has caused callousness, inhumanity, and extraordinary suffering.

Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave people—the young and the old—a way of life with more liberty and control, including the liberty to be less beholden to other generations. The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It’s been replaced by veneration of the independent self.

If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

!!!!

This is normal. Although the processes can be slowed—diet and physical activity can make a difference—they cannot be stopped.

we live and we die. might as well enjoy it.

“To die of age is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death, and so much less natural than others: it is the last and extremest kind of dying.”