A Family Says ‘Enough’
By PAULA SPAN, NYT
The story ran more than three years ago in The New York Times Magazine, but fairly often I come across people who remember it.
They usually can’t retrieve the name of the daughter who wrote it (Katy Butler), and they’re hazy about the details of her father’s condition (a stroke nearly seven years earlier, followed by deepening dementia).
But the outline of the family’s dilemma has stayed with them. An incapacitated man deprived of nearly everything that gave his life meaning. A wife shattered and exhausted from the relentless demands of caregiving. A pacemaker – installed after the stroke without much thought to the consequences — that kept his heart beating while his mind and body collapsed. His wife and daughter wanted the pacemaker deactivated, a simple, painless, nonsurgical procedure that would allow him to die without further suffering. Doctors and hospitals said no.
Ms. Butler, a journalist in San Francisco, has spent much of the intervening years at work on the just-published “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death.” She has learned, and explains in this book, a lot about pacemakers, heart surgery, I.C.U.’s, medical marketing and the conveyor belt that American medicine can become. She appends a useful list of books and Web sites and organizations.
(More here.)
The story ran more than three years ago in The New York Times Magazine, but fairly often I come across people who remember it.
They usually can’t retrieve the name of the daughter who wrote it (Katy Butler), and they’re hazy about the details of her father’s condition (a stroke nearly seven years earlier, followed by deepening dementia).
But the outline of the family’s dilemma has stayed with them. An incapacitated man deprived of nearly everything that gave his life meaning. A wife shattered and exhausted from the relentless demands of caregiving. A pacemaker – installed after the stroke without much thought to the consequences — that kept his heart beating while his mind and body collapsed. His wife and daughter wanted the pacemaker deactivated, a simple, painless, nonsurgical procedure that would allow him to die without further suffering. Doctors and hospitals said no.
Ms. Butler, a journalist in San Francisco, has spent much of the intervening years at work on the just-published “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death.” She has learned, and explains in this book, a lot about pacemakers, heart surgery, I.C.U.’s, medical marketing and the conveyor belt that American medicine can become. She appends a useful list of books and Web sites and organizations.
(More here.)
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