Excerpt from: New York Times (click for full article)
With dying humans, similar situations arise every day: hospital stays that fix the acute problem and worsen the chronic ones; emergency department visits that yield diagnoses but require weeks of recovery from the waiting and testing; surgeries that are themselves minor but provoke major confusion, complications and hated nursing home stays. On the other hand, there are the relatively simple problems that might be addressed by a doctor if only seeing one didn’t require an ambulance for transportation, or time off work by an adult child, or more taxi fare than remains in the Social Security check, or more effort than seems worth the while.
And sometimes it’s even more complicated than that. Last year, a patient of mine with 15 major medical problems, including a form of leukemia, decided he didn’t ever want to return to the hospital, do chemotherapy, or try any of the other treatments we discussed. But for weeks after that, he railed and fumed at the prospect of palliative care, because he wanted very badly to live.
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