The Challenges Of Providing End-Of-Life Care In A Pandemic
End-of-life care that provides clarity and dignity. We talk about the challenges of providing palliative care in the middle of a pandemic.
Guests
Dr. Sunita Puri, director of palliative medicine at the Keck Hospital & Norris Cancer Center of the University of Southern California, where she also leads the ethics committee. Author of “That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the 11th Hour.” (@SunitaPuriMD)
Dr. Vicki Jackson, chief of the division of palliative care and geriatric medicine at Mass General Hospital. Co-director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Palliative Care. (@VjacksonJackson)
From The Reading List
New York Times: “It’s Time to Talk About Death” — “Joseph, a man in his 70s, has been on a ventilator for two weeks. His heart, lungs and kidneys are failing. Though I know these facts about his physiology, I will never see him up close. I can only glance at him through clear glass doors, the ventilator and dialysis machine obscuring his face. The coronavirus has limited the number of physicians who can enter his room.”
Los Angeles Times: “Op-Ed: The good that can come when we stop seeing cancer as a battle to win or lose” — “When Alex Trebek, the longtime ‘Jeopardy’ host, revealed to the world that he’d been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer this spring, his statement echoed the words of many patients I’ve treated.”
New York Times: “The Lesson of Impermanence” — “As a palliative care doctor, I spend much of my time face-to-face with pain and suffering, debilitating disease and death. When I began my training, I thought I was comfortable with the idea of mortality, and with the notion that fighting death at all costs wasn’t the sole purpose of medicine. But I hadn’t expected that the type of medicine I’d chosen to practice would require a strength and perspective that medical training hadn’t offered.”
The Atlantic: “What Medical School Doesn’t Teach About Death” — “To say that the practice of palliative care comes to vivid life in Sunita Puri’s pages may seem like a bad choice of words. But her memoir about tending to seriously, often incurably, sick people pulls off that feat. The driven daughter of Indian immigrants (her father is an engineer, her mother an anesthesiologist), she was in for a shock during her residency.”
Boston Globe: “In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we must have those serious illness conversations” — “The medical term is ‘serious illness conversation’: A patient with a chronic or life-shortening condition talks with their clinician about their understanding of their illness and prognosis as well as their hopes, fears, and values. The goal is for both parties to arrive at a shared understanding of patients’ priorities for living and how those priorities might change when they become more sick.”
The Mercury News: “The COVID-19 talk families need to have now” — “One of the haunting realities of the COVID-19 pandemic is that people are suffering and dying alone in intensive-care units. They might need ventilators or other machines to keep them alive, and they have no loved ones holding their hands, offering love and support and helping to convey their wishes to doctors.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org. [Copyright 2020 NPR]
