"darkness, darkness, bind him to me / hide him in your velvet cloak"

[larryhammer]

A long New Yorker feature on how we die and what hospice care is, exactly, and in the way of all good long features, it touches on several other issues of what health care for the terminally ill actually involves.

There is almost always a long tail of possibility, however thin. What’s wrong with looking for it? Nothing, it seems to me, unless it means we have failed to prepare for the outcome that’s vastly more probable. The trouble is that we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We’ve created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets—and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near-certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.

Forgot where I came across this -- apologies as due.

---L.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for that. It meant a lot to me. My mother died of a sudden catastrophic illness, but seeing what happened in the hospital in terms of interventions, and thinking about thing my father said--well, what the article had to say really resonated.

[larryhammer]

De nada. It's ... not an easy topic to talk about.

---L.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Followed as a result of the marmoset conversation. :)

I love Atul Gawande's work, when I remember to read it; thank you for linking.

[larryhammer]

This was the first I'd read anything by him, though I've seen discussions of his books.

---L.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

I have not read his books; I've read other articles over the years, though. Once I'm done with grad school, maybe I will have brains to read nonfiction again.

[larryhammer]

Grad school does have that effect, ya.

---L.