Sanchita Sharma, Hindustan Times, Dec 18, 2016 US-based Indian-American Paul Kalanithi was 15 months away from completing his training as a neurosurgeon at age 36 when he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. The cancer was inoperable, he was going to die. “When Breath Becomes Air” is a memoir that begins with him examining
Read moreJennie Dear, Sep 9, 2016 – The Atlantic My mother and I sat across from the hospice nurse in my parents’ Colorado home. It was 2005, and my mother had reached the end of treatments for metastatic breast cancer. A month or two earlier, she’d been able to take the dog for daily walks in
Read moreRN by Victoria Pengilley for Life Matters, 26 Jun 2018. Cancer is a diagnosis no-one wants to hear. What follows is fear, uncertainty and the upheaval of life as you know it. More than 120,000 Australians are diagnosed with cancer each year, and the number is set to rise. Cancer Council Australia predicts one in
Read moreRN by Anna Kelsey-Sugg for Saturday Extra, 28 Jul 2018. Intensive care specialist Ken Hillman believes it’s become too hard to die. When his grandfather died in 1959, it was in his own room at home, with little medical intervention. “Most people’s grandfathers died at home in those days, because the general practitioner was the
Read moreABC Radio Sydney, by Linda Mottram and Matthew Bevan 11 May 2015. How do you talk to the grieving parent of a dead child? There is a “conspiracy of silence” when children die in our society, says a visiting bereavement expert. And we no longer have the time or the understanding of death that enables
Read moreTommaso Bruni, 11 October, 2016 Tommaso is a research associate in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College in London, UK. He is interested in the ethics of clinical research, the ethics of neuroscience, and bioethics. Published in association with The London Health and Society Hub, an Aeon Partner John Smith,
Read moreBy Eliza Laschon , 22 May 2016, 11:07am Perth woman Cait Calcutt had a limited understanding of palliative care until the day she reached out to a service which transformed her family’s life. Ms Calcutt’s partner Nigel Livesey was in his early 40s when he was diagnosed with three chronic, life-limiting diseases. For nine years
Read moreBy David Malham New York Times, March 11, 2015 I would not have chosen A.L.S. at the Pick Your Disease store, but there are worse things that can happen and worse ways for a life to end. The very fact that it was happening to me and not to my family was itself a relief.
Read moreAuthored by Jane McCredie, 30 July 2018 IN 2013, a 21-year-old Spanish physics student, Mario Rodríguez, died of leukaemia after refusing a second round of chemotherapy in favour of “natural” remedies recommended by his homeopath. In the wake of his son’s death, Mario’s grieving father, Julián Rodríguez, launched a legal action against the homeopath for
Read moreBy James Bullen, ABC, 29 Jun 2016 Doctors have called for the public to discuss end of life care with their loved ones after a study revealed one third of elderly patients with advanced or terminal illnesses receive unnecessary treatment in the last six months of their lives. The global analysis of 38 studies of
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