Finishing Our Story: Preparing for the End of Life

This book is for people who have questions about the end of life - what to expect, how to prepare for it, what to do when you get there. It is intended to help you understand this important part of life and prepare for it better, for yourself and for those who are important to you. Contemporary medical diagnostics and treatments have provided hope and wonderful outcomes for many people, but for some at the end of life, contemporary medicine also brings distress, uncertainty, and conflict. The process of dying may be prolonged and associated with great expense, and death often occurs in a hospital rather than at home. Also, as we are dying, we may be in a condition in which we cannot express our wishes about important decisions and such decisions must be left to others. Here the author, a physician who has cared for dying patients, served as an ethics consultant, interacting with patients, their families, physicians, and other health professionals, and taught end of life issues to medical and other health profession students, discusses in straight-forward language the matters that are pertinent to preparing for the process of dying - how dying has changed and why that is important, what we mean by quality of life and how that relates to end-of-life decisions, what are the implications of making one's wishes known and how to ensure that they are followed, how ethical conflicts that arise in the care of dying patients may be resolved, what palliative care is and when one might consider receiving its benefits, the facts about physician-assisted death and other forms of suicide when dying seems inevitably soon, and what it means to create the final chapter of the narrative of one's own life--

Author: Gregory L. Eastwood

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Publication Date: Mar 01, 2019

Number of Pages: 152 pages

Language: English

Binding: Paperback

ISBN-10: 0190888083

ISBN-13: 9780190888084