In art (and that includes reality TV shows), when someone is told that they have a condition that will end their life they ask, “How long have I got,” and are given honest answers. They are allowed to make choices. In real life, even doctors don’t want to talk about it. Mum’s consultant said, “Well, I really wouldn’t like to say.” And that was the truth. He knew. I’m certain of that but he didn’t want to say. He had already failed and he didn’t want to talk about it. Who can blame him? Well, we can. We do. Mum did but I often wonder if that’s fair. A doctor’s job is to keep someone alive but as nobody can live forever it’s an impossible job.
The Long Suffering Husband came back from his MOT quite stressed. “If I die it was a woman with a white van, who lives in the next town,” he told me. When he calmed down he explained that he had been talking to a woman while he was waiting. The LSH can talk to anyone, is a really good listener and as he has lived with me for a while is quite used to talking about death. So, this lady was talking about the death of her husband. He had died quite suddenly from a heart condition that the GP hadn’t diagnosed. In fact, the GP had treated his symptoms as an irritating cough (mainly because those were his symptoms) but the lady told the LSH that she hadn’t been able to forgive the doctor. “I wanted to bake some biscotti for him to say thank you and lace it with arsenic.” The LSH struggled to swallow the piece of biscotti that was in his mouth but tried to listen politely as she told him that her friends had talked her out of murder but she was yet to be convinced her GP wasn’t solely responsible for her husband’s death. There are no guarantees that even if the cough had been properly diagnosed
death wouldn’t have occurred anyway. We expect a lot from our doctors.
death wouldn’t have occurred anyway. We expect a lot from our doctors.
After all, bodies are complicated; so complicated that one doctor can’t know everything about a human and so for our medical care we are divided into our constituent parts. When we get to the stage where we are dying it takes a doctor who knows about the whole body to really understand what is going on. Doctors who choose to work in palliative care are seen as weirdos by other doctors.
Why would they want to work in a field where they fail all the time? In our society, preserving life has become the highest goal for doctors.
I read somewhere that trainee doctors have to spend a certain amount of time delivering babies but there is no requirement at all to witness or help someone through death. It is unlikely that a doctor will get through their training without witnessing a death because people die and sick people do it more often than healthy people. However, training doctors to share information with their patients
and relatives and be appropriately compassionate should be essential.
I think there are similarities between birth and death. Those who work in palliative care are a bit like death midwives. One of the reasons that birth has got so much better is that women are informed about the process. When I was pregnant I read every book going. I wanted to know everything that could happen and so I was prepared for the worst and hoping for the best. Not everyone does this and some people prefer the surprise.
The thing about birth is that no one really knows how the foetus is experiencing it, so the birth guides are for the people who are here before: the mothers. With death, the big unknown, and the thing that freaks us out most is that we can never know what’s next. You can write a guidebook for the person that’s dying but you can’t say what (if anything happens after). I’d like to think there is a book like
this that you get as soon as you’ve died. “Welcome to the afterlife: a guide by Heather R Furr.”
We do know that if you can eliminate fear from birth the experience is much easier. I assume the same is true for death. This won’t be easy because, unlike lambs, we are hard wired to cling onto life, regardless.
After my dad died I started to read everything I could about death. I think this was part of my grieving process, as books are always my solution. I discovered that people are beginning to want to get informed about death. Death Cafés are springing up, where people can talk about it over cake and palliative care teams are beginning to suggest that doctors should know more about death. So, when Mum was diagnosed I was reading a book called ‘With The End In Mind’ by Dr Kathryn Mannix. It’s a book by a palliative care doctor full of case histories that should lead you to the conclusion that death isn’t that bad, we should embrace it, talk about it and plan for it. It’s a great book but it
shouldn’t be the only one. It was a fantastic book for me when I was in the ‘merely curious’ phase but I would have liked a more practical handbook to help through the difficult times.
I can’t tell you whether death isn’t that bad for most people. The two I have witnessed in the last two years were pretty awful. I suspect that this was because the medics involved weren’t prepared to accept and plan for the deaths. Dad knew he was dying and accepted it with grace. He had been in heart failure for the last five years and knew that he had reached the end. He wasn’t, however, prepared for how long and painful that end phase would be. “If you had a pet dog and it couldn’t eat, barely sipped at it’s water bowl without being sick, couldn’t go in the garden for a pee then you’d take it to the vet,” he said frequently. The GP, however, thought that someone had to be bed ridden to be dying and suggested that bringing a palliative care team in was premature. By the time they were involved and his nurse came back from her holiday it was all too little too late,
With Mum it was different. She had been stopped from properly thinking about it by the consultant’s refusal to talk about and and the oncologist’s upbeat, positive manner. “I can’t say,” he said
cheerfully, “But in cancer we never talk about more than five years.” Why would you plan for death if you thought you had five years? Those of us who were caring for her, however, would have liked an honest handbook. We would have liked to have been prepared for what was to come. We would have liked the medics to be honest with us and themselves. It would have been so much better to have been told rather than hearing the words “possible catastrophic bleed.”, whispered behind you, although even that was better than if I hadn’t been prepared for it at all. It would have been better for them to have forced the issue when my sister suggested buttercup syrup, rather than just cryptically saying, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” It would have been better if the doctor who came out (without the drugs we needed) hadn’t taken us to one side and whispered, “She’s dying,” at us with a shocked look on his face. It would have been better if I hadn’t felt I had to say, “No shit Sherlock, do you
Why would they want to work in a field where they fail all the time? In our society, preserving life has become the highest goal for doctors.
I read somewhere that trainee doctors have to spend a certain amount of time delivering babies but there is no requirement at all to witness or help someone through death. It is unlikely that a doctor will get through their training without witnessing a death because people die and sick people do it more often than healthy people. However, training doctors to share information with their patients
and relatives and be appropriately compassionate should be essential.
I think there are similarities between birth and death. Those who work in palliative care are a bit like death midwives. One of the reasons that birth has got so much better is that women are informed about the process. When I was pregnant I read every book going. I wanted to know everything that could happen and so I was prepared for the worst and hoping for the best. Not everyone does this and some people prefer the surprise.
The thing about birth is that no one really knows how the foetus is experiencing it, so the birth guides are for the people who are here before: the mothers. With death, the big unknown, and the thing that freaks us out most is that we can never know what’s next. You can write a guidebook for the person that’s dying but you can’t say what (if anything happens after). I’d like to think there is a book like
this that you get as soon as you’ve died. “Welcome to the afterlife: a guide by Heather R Furr.”
We do know that if you can eliminate fear from birth the experience is much easier. I assume the same is true for death. This won’t be easy because, unlike lambs, we are hard wired to cling onto life, regardless.
After my dad died I started to read everything I could about death. I think this was part of my grieving process, as books are always my solution. I discovered that people are beginning to want to get informed about death. Death Cafés are springing up, where people can talk about it over cake and palliative care teams are beginning to suggest that doctors should know more about death. So, when Mum was diagnosed I was reading a book called ‘With The End In Mind’ by Dr Kathryn Mannix. It’s a book by a palliative care doctor full of case histories that should lead you to the conclusion that death isn’t that bad, we should embrace it, talk about it and plan for it. It’s a great book but it
shouldn’t be the only one. It was a fantastic book for me when I was in the ‘merely curious’ phase but I would have liked a more practical handbook to help through the difficult times.
With Mum it was different. She had been stopped from properly thinking about it by the consultant’s refusal to talk about and and the oncologist’s upbeat, positive manner. “I can’t say,” he said
cheerfully, “But in cancer we never talk about more than five years.” Why would you plan for death if you thought you had five years? Those of us who were caring for her, however, would have liked an honest handbook. We would have liked to have been prepared for what was to come. We would have liked the medics to be honest with us and themselves. It would have been so much better to have been told rather than hearing the words “possible catastrophic bleed.”, whispered behind you, although even that was better than if I hadn’t been prepared for it at all. It would have been better for them to have forced the issue when my sister suggested buttercup syrup, rather than just cryptically saying, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” It would have been better if the doctor who came out (without the drugs we needed) hadn’t taken us to one side and whispered, “She’s dying,” at us with a shocked look on his face. It would have been better if I hadn’t felt I had to say, “No shit Sherlock, do you
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