hope

Illustrations © Barbara J Holzapfel

When one is receiving news of a terminal illness the overwhelming initial reaction is simple disbelief.  One of my own family members recently faced such a conversation with her oncologist. As the news was shared on a private Facebook message stream, disbelief spread throughout the family and in flooded prayers and hopes for a miracle recovery. 

While hope is a comforting and potentially valuable stance to take, it is not a plan and can often derail us from having important, time sensitive, quality of life conversations with our loved ones and medical teams.

In Dr Atul Gawande's bestseller "Being Mortal" he says..

"What happens when you get sick is that you're governed most of all by your fears, and of course your biggest fear is that you might die. People are becoming more aware of the ways in which their care can take away other things that sometimes are even more important to them, and those things can be their ability to be aware and communicate with others; their ability to be at home and in control of their lives; their ability to interact and work and do things important to them..

.. There's a lot of folks for whom there's nothing else except, "Look, whatever it takes, I want to be aggressive, and give me everything that we've got." as the starting point, but these are journeys. The first round of effort succeeds, then you're happy. It's really what happens when the first round of what you think is going to work doesn't work, and then you get to the second round, and then you get to the third round. And somewhere around there your life has become your disease and your treatment, and the possibilities that you're going to win the lottery with your ticket start to diminish. That's where most people start to be concerned about losing things that are really important to them. But they have a hard time talking about it with their families, sometimes have a hard time talking about it with themselves, and certainly have a hard time talking about it with their doctors."

If our society was to provide the container in which discussions regarding personal end of life possibilities could occur, we may require less time and energy to review eleventh hour options and priorities and more time and space to lovingly hope and pray.