NEW YORK: The surgeon and writer is famous for finding medical solutions. Now he faces one of the biggest questions of all – what makes a good death?
Atul Gawande’s work, Being Mortal, deals with end-of-life care: the dilemmas of skilled nursing homes, final treatment options and when doctor or patient should declare that enough is enough. Our end may be unfixable but Gawande firmly believes that the way we get there is not. As the baby boomers come of age, a generation that thought it might live forever is having to face the question of how they want their final decades to take shape. For many, this means avoiding an institutionalized end as much as possible. “In a war you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation,” Gawande writes. “You want… someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender it when he couldn’t.”
What Gawande wants medical professionals of the future to take on board is the idea that well-being means more than survival. Each of us has different priorities that make our lives worth living. “Since [doctors] have the capacity to keep trying not just to relieve pain but… keep you on machines and extend life, we lose sight of what people might want to be alive for,” he says. For Gawande, as long as his brain is still working, he’s happy to be kept going. In one of the stories he relates, an elderly man only wants to stay alive if he is able to continue eating chocolate ice cream and watching football…