How do you tell someone that they are going to die? How do you ask them how do they want their final months or days to be? Does longevity of life matter more than the quality of life? What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? These are difficult questions to ask someone or ask yourself. Atul Gawande sheds some light on what doctors, patients and the patient’s families do when medicine can’t save your life. Gawande is a surgeon and a writer and in this article, he tells the stories of multiple people all from very different lives and different ages and different types of illnesses. The one thing that all these people have in common is that they all have is that they are all on the tail ends of there life. They all have some kind of terminal illness.
These people are all average people in the United States have kids, a spouse, a job, a house. I always been told that I am a very blunt and brutally honest person or that I have no filter. And I try to be. I hate when people beat around the bush to tell me a problem with something that I am doing. I tell them just tell me I can take it. The one thing I don’t think don’t think I could take so bluntly is if someone told me I had three months to live. And I am a person that doesn’t show my emotions very well. I tend to hold them in till I’m alone it also takes a lot to change my mood as well. When reading this article every time a question was brought up to one of these people of: How do you want to go? It made me think that if I was in the shoes of those people and how would I want to go. My immediate reaction was I want to stay alive as long as possible. As I indulged myself in the text I changed my mind from wanting quantity or quality of life. Did I really want to be in a hospital bed when I die or at home surrounded by family and friends? I would rather live a shorter life if I can be doing what I want to do than a long life in misery and pain.
You spend quite a bit of time here writing about how to talk to someone who’s dying. That could be a good question to write about.
Try to work more directly with Gawande’s words using paraphrase (of a specific set of lines from the article) and direct quotation. Be sure to embed those words in the context of your ideas and follow up. Refer to the Integrating Idea with Others Rubric for ways to build context and follow up paraphrases and quotes.