End-of-life insights don’t come as often to me as during the period in which my end-of-life lexicon blossomed and grew (in fact, that work seems complete now). However, one has arisen. It’s a mashup of several things. First is an increasing number of angst-ridden conversations on Facebook’s excellent Slow Medicine group, a very decent environment […]
Haphazard Encounters of the Last Kind (Why Everyone Hates the Thought of Dying) One sentence abstract: Just as price transparency is required for a financially equitable and true marketplace, treatment orientation transparency is required for just and peaceful dying. Since 2004–05 as a result of my parents’ three-week terminal hospitalizations (Mom’s, comatose and intubated in […]
Occasionally I get a touch cranky. I want to clearly say that palliative medicine and those who offer it to its fullest deserve our gratitude. And I don’t want to alienate any palliative provider I might ask for assistance in the future. But I remain highly skeptical and deeply worried because every exposure I have […]
It’s clear that the medical system cannot adequately educate its charges. Patient activists/advocates know that an informed citizenry is required to materially improve medicine. Our participation is all the more requisite around end of life because in order to actualize peaceful dying we must each own our own death, just like women a generation ago […]
Bite the dust, the big one. Buy the farm. Cash in your chips. Check out. Croak. Cross over. Depart. Expire. Give up the ghost. Good to go. Gone to your reward. Kick the bucket. Meet your maker. Off the mortal coil. Pass on or away. Pushing up daisies. What do these phrases, these substitutes for […]
The following is a 750-word op-ed that originally appeared in the Boulder Daily Camera on 4.8.12. At first I didn’t think I could condense a day-long conversation into 1150 words (I mimicked the word count that paid freelance columnists get). I did—but papers really do enforce their word counts for you and me so that […]
It’s back: that scary phrase, that bald lie: “death panel.” As in, “the United States government will enact or enable panels of bureaucrats who will withhold medical treatment from your grandma or grandpa and let them instead die.” This was a (failed) provision of 2010’s healthcare reform act; now the accusers say that death panels […]
In yesterday afternoon’s HARO (www.HelpAReporterOut) list I learned of Susanna Speier’s Huffington Post column, Politiku. Politikus are hiku’s (3-line Japanese poems or stanzas with a 5-syllable, 7-syllable, 5-syllable structure) focusing on all things political. Speier put out a HARO call for health care reform politikus. Right up my alley (I write poetry in addition to […]
INAUGURAL BLOG POST: This weekend I attended the Colorado Independent Publishers Association annual College—the annual brain dump, er, conference. Saturday’s closing session, by distant past President Kenn Amdahl, titled My Obsession Your Obsession, was brilliant. A melange/collage of thought and expression, Kenn spoke over/while playing guitar, resurrecting and interpreting 200 year old unearthed Irish folk […]
