Book: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Author: Atul Gawande
Fiction/Nonfiction: Nonfiction
Have I Read this Author Before: No
One Sentence Summary: Through Research, studies, and Personal Experience with patients, Gawande outlines the medical path of terminal patients, the traditional doctor/healthcare response, and describes his thoughts on how to make our last days “better,” for whatever that means for the patient
The Best Thing about the Book: The writing is clear and empathetic and Gawande uses real-life stories of people he has interviewed to demonstrate the problems with our end-of-life solutions and also some inspiring stories of when we got it right; very eye opening but in a hopeful way
The Worst Thing about the Book: The stories are often sad, and I found myself tearing up at times and wishing for more radical change
Did it Make me want to keep Reading: Yes
What I Learned: So many things. I often will take pictures of pages as I’m reading so I can refer back to something I’ve learned in preparation for this blog; in this case I would have been taking pictures on almost every page; I learned about the history of nursing homes, and how they developed out of a need to get people out of the hospitals; I learned how in other cultures the elderly are very highly respected and are taken in and taken care of, by their extended families; I learned about the ways in which nursing homes fail, and the ways in which pioneers have created experimental alternatives that still offer independence and dignity and choices; I learned about various medical conditions and the suffering they bring and the medical interventions that often help, and often make things worse; the role of hospice as it should be: helping people to have “good days” for their last days, instead of how we’ve come to view hospice; I could go on and on
The Bottom Line: Gawande makes a great case for considering what you want at end of life, regardless of your age; write it down and share it with your loved ones; what are the things that are most important to you–for one individual in Gawande’s book it was to be able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football–and what are you willing to endure to have those things
Would I Read this Author Again: Yes
Next Book to be Read by this Author: Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science
F Words that are not 4 Letters 