Quotes About Support

The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of disease as possible and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world. Most doctors treat disease and figure that the rest will take care of itself.

Your chances of avoiding the nursing home are directly related to the number of children you have, and, according to what little research has been done, having at least one daughter seems to be crucial to the amount of help you will receive.

Assisted living most often became a mere layover on the way from independent living to a nursing home.

As fewer of us are struck dead out of the blue, most of us will spend significant periods of our lives too reduced and debilitated to live independently. We do not like to think about this eventuality. As a result, most of us are unprepared for it. We rarely pay more than glancing attention to how we will live when we need help until it's too late to do much about it.

But under promise of anonymity, an official admitted that there was no direct evidence to support the charges of homicide.

When other doctors needed an orthopedist for family and friends, they called on him.

he was the one who had put in the most time caring for Walker.

They all believed that you didn't need to sacrifice your autonomy just because you needed help in your life.

He even put me in touch with former colleagues and patients. His only request was that I not use his real name.

In the end what he gave Eleanor and her father was mainly confidence, from what I could see.

It is all I can do not to take over. But she cannot learn without doing, I tell myself. I decide to let her have one more try.

he relied on me for surgical expertise.

They all believed that you didn't need to sacrifice your autonomy just because you needed help in your life. And I realized, in meeting these people, that they shared a very particular philosophical idea of what kind of autonomy mattered most in life.

her arm. Her face sagged. Her speech slurred. Although

The question therefore is... how can we build a health care system that will actually help people achieve what's most important to them at the end of their lives

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And

Mr. Drury seldom questioned his daughter's choices, but this sounded to him like a bad idea.

help people in a state of dependence sustain the value of existence.

His thirty-something son moved in to care for him.

his own failure to be at her bedside when things got out of control.

For the solution to chronic pain may lie more in what goes on around us than in what is going on inside us.

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

I offered no excuses. I promised to be better prepared for such cases and to be quicker to ask for help.

In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state—