… Loprinzi and colleagues review a series of articles from the Journal of Clinical Oncology which addresses how to have difficult conversations (giving bad news, making life decisions). A recurrent theme highlights the importance of the physician working through his/her own needs and issues … eg “The article presents data from behavioral research that documents […]
compassionate honesty … Read More »
… Dino D’Agata discusses Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking and Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death in his “Hope as Forbidden Metaphor“. “Yet Didion also, to my chagrin, succumbs to post-modernity’s coercion when she, like Rieff, begins recriminating herself for wanting to believe her husband still lives. You want to shake her and
grief and eternity … Read More »
… performed this weekend by the Wichita Symphony Orchestra. Maestro Hege discusses. listen to excerpts … Much like life and death … “There’s a sense of tragedy at the beginning, a visceral quality that grabs you right from the outset. Then it goes through all these different moods — of being ambivalent; of being very
mahler symphony #2 … resurrection … Read More »
… Vaclav Havel opens the “Forum 2000” conference … Much of what he says has direct applicability to health care, health care reform & palliative care … “I sense behind all of this not only a globally spreading short-sightedness, but also the swollen self-consciousness of this civilisation, whose basic attributes include the supercilious idea that
close together … but otherwise desperately remote … Read More »
… makes possible what would appear to be impossible. CL Canada discusses euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. An Event, Now, Allows Us to Embrace Life The current debate on euthanasia and assisted suicide has seen many terms bandied about, at times intelligently, at other times deceptively. From one side or the other we hear about
only a relationship … Read More »
… a film that has won many awards … tells the experiences (through the recovered diary) of an elderly lady living alone in Brooklyn. “Jessie Singer Sylvester moved anonymously through old age in Brooklyn in the 1970s, absorbing one loss after the next — her job of 59 years, her beloved sister, her friends, her
beautiful hills of brooklyn … Read More »
Millet’s ‘The Sick Child’ “The simple and daily gesture of a mother, when looked at deeply, reflects the love and patience of those who elect to entirely devote themselves to keep the ill person company. But it may be that only she who takes part in giving birth can most serenely accept the tribulations and
accompanying the sick … Read More »
… and are willing to be accompanied by others … Zucchi discusses the real choices to be engaged at life’s end. “Our choice is between hopelessness and hope, between despair and another way of looking at life, where we are not masters of our own destinies but rather human beings who uphold our fellow human
human beings who uphold our fellow human beings … Read More »
… and Thou art calling me … So starts Newman’s meditation on death through the prayer of a dying man – The Dream of Gerontius – set to music in Elgar’s master choral work. a related prayer of Newman’s … ‘May He support us all the day long, till the shadows lengthen and the evening
I am near to death … Read More »
