Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retire-ments before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 mil-lion Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a ...
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Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retire-ments before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 mil-lion Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker. The device kept his heart beating but did nothing to prevent his slide into dementia, incontinence, near-muteness, and misery. After several years, he asked his wife for help, telling her, I am living too long. Mother and daughter faced a series of wrench-ing moral questions: When does death cease being a curse and become a blessing? Where is the line between saving life and prolonging a dying? When is the right time to say to a doctor, Let my loved one go ? When doctors refused to disable the pace-maker, sentencing her father to a protracted and agonizing death, Katy set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother faced her own illness, rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and instead met death head-on. "Knocking on Heaven s Door," a revolution-ary blend of memoir and investigative reporting, is the fruit of the Butler family s journey. With a reporter s skill, a poet s eye, and a daughter s love, Butler explores what happens when our terror of death collides with the tech-nological imperatives of modern medicine. Her provocative thesis is that advanced medicine, in its single-minded pursuit of maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it prevents. Butler lays bare the tangled web of technology, medicine, and commerce that modern dying has become and chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine a growing movement that promotes care over cure. "Knocking on Heaven s Door" is a visionary map through the labyrinth of a broken and morally adrift medical system. It will inspire the necessary and difficult conversations we all need to have with loved ones as it illuminates a path to a better way of death.
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I also bought copies to give to my 2 daughters so they'll have guidance when my husband & I become the very elderly. The book is excellent.
MorningReader
Mar 20, 2014
A Tough, but Important Read
After losing my own parents and then my in-laws. I remembered feeling very torn by how I'd like my last years on earth to be. Katy Butler offers great insight to being enmeshed in the medical system at a time when there is really no cure for dying. After telling her experiences, she offers suggestions for other avenues we can take instead of visits to the ER or nursing facilities. I'm keeping her book as a resource for me someday. At 65 I was happy to learn that it's okay to accept death and not prolong the dying.