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Very touching. It must take courage to resist treatment, even if you know you're going to die anyway. I hope I never have to decide, but I ever am in her shoes, I hope I'm brave enough to spend any time left with my family and saying goodbyes. On a related note, NYT wrote a story on "How Doctors Die" http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/your-money/how-doctors-die... " What Dr. McKinley wanted was time with her husband, a radiologist, and their two college-age children, and another summer to soak her feet in the Atlantic Ocean. But most of all, she wanted “a little more time being me and not being somebody else.” So, she turned down more treatment and began hospice care, the point at which the medical fight to extend life gives way to creating the best quality of life for the time that is left. Dr. Robert Gilkeson, Dr. McKinley’s husband, remembers his mother-in-law, Alice McKinley, being unable to comprehend her daughter’s decision. “ ‘Isn’t there some treatment we could do here?’ she pleaded with me,” he recalled. “I almost had to bite my tongue, so I didn’t say, ‘Do you have any idea how much disease your daughter has?’ ” Dr. McKinley and her husband were looking at her disease as doctors, who know the limits of medicine; her mother was looking at her daughter’s cancer as a mother, clinging to the promise of medicine as " |
"How Doctors Die" http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die...
"How doctors choose to die" http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/feb/08/how-doctors-c...