Quotes About Decisions

Block has a list of questions that she aims to cover with sick patients in the time before decisions have to be made: What do they understand their prognosis to be, what are their concerns about what lies ahead, what kinds of trade-offs are they willing to make, how do they want to spend their time if their health worsens, who do they want to make decisions if they can't?

The key word in her mind was home. Home is the one place where your own priorities hold sway. At home, you decide how you spend your time, how you share your space, and how you manage your possessions. Away from home, you don't. This loss of freedom was what people like Lou Sanders and Wilson's mother, Jessie, dreaded. Wilson

Do you want to be resuscitated if your heart stops? 2. Do you want aggressive treatments such as intubation and mechanical ventilation? 3. Do you want antibiotics? 4. Do you want tube or intravenous feeding if you can't eat on your own?

What do they understand their prognosis to be, what are their concerns about what lies ahead, what kinds of trade-offs are they willing to make, how do they want to spend their time if their health worsens, who do they want to make decisions if they can't?

The job of doctors is to supply up-to-date knowledge and skills. The job of patients is to supply the decisions.

what treatments they were being given

They were regarded as children: too fragile and simpleminded to handle the truth, let alone make decisions.

And they missed out on treatments that they might have preferred.

One of the reasons for this dramatic shift in how decisions are made in medicine was a 1984 book

decisions perhaps influenced by money, professional bias (for example, surgeons tend to favor surgery), and personal idiosyncrasy.

Most doctors, taking seriously the idea that patients should control their own fates, lay out the options and the risks involved.

What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

What were her biggest fears and concerns? What goals were most important to her? What trade-offs was she willing to make, and what ones was she not? Not

I need to understand how much you're willing to go through to have a shot at being alive and what level of being alive is tolerable to you.

The key word in her mind was home. Home is the one place where your own priorities hold sway. At home, you decide how you spend your time, how you share your space, and how you manage your possessions. Away from home, you don't. This loss of freedom was what people like Lou Sanders and Wilson's mother, Jessie, dreaded.

According to Block, about two-thirds of patients are willing to undergo therapies they don't want if that is what their loved ones want. The

What were her biggest fears and concerns? What goals were most important to her? What trade-offs was she willing to make, and what ones was she not?

1. Do you want to be resuscitated if your heart stops? 2. Do you want aggressive treatments such as intubation and mechanical ventilation? 3. Do you want antibiotics? 4. Do you want tube or intravenous feeding if you can't eat on your own?

In the absence of algorithms and evidence about what to do, you learn in medicine to make decisions by feel.

A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.

Living a self-conscious life, under the pressure of time, I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all my life's decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether this death comes next week or thirty years from now, this consciousness gives my life another breadth. It helps shape the words I speak, the way I love, my politics of action, the strength of my vision and purpose, the depth of my appreciation of living.

Decisions are beautiful. They are the evidence of thought and care. Decisions are the polishing cloths of life.

Serenity comes from the ability to say "Yes" to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say "No" to the wrong choices made by others.

There are no answers, only choices.