Lynda E

“assisted living isn’t really built for the sake of older people so much as for the sake of their children.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End

“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? A decade”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End