Being Mortal, The Tricky Decission Making, and What Really Matter in The End

 

By definition Decision Making is the process of making choices by identifying a decision, gathering information, and assessing alternative resolutions, and yes it is just as simple and as complicated as it may sounds. Playing a role as decision maker is indeed a tricky position, but being one at the end of someone’s life is a different high all together. I come across dr. Atul Gawande’s book years after I first saw his interview on Think BIG “how doctors penetrating fears”, and it was quite accidentally to be honest. I was so inspired by his interview especially of how eloquent he is with words, but somehow I never look up for his books and to my regret not even knowing he has wrote a book. Until one day I saw his book on IG page that I followed, I instantly sold on it and purchased the book online. Its not until sometimes ago that I finally really get to read the book and as expected it was such a masterpiece. The book is an honest depiction on how it really is to grow old or deal with the end of life. What really got my attention is that this book feel so humane and humble coming from a doctor. Being a doctor myself, I have a different perspective of seeing my profession. When I was younger I saw doctors like an angel, now being one somehow the way I saw my self as a doctor has somewhat shifted, we treat the disease not the people, the goal is to cure the disease, to eradicate them if possible, sometime at whatever cost. We came to the patient with sets of therapy choices, from the one that has a strong evidence base and recommendation to ones that we are not so sure about but seems quite promising on paper.

It is a well known fact that the progression of knowledge in medical field has come to tremendous advance, that it has profoundly altered the course of human life. A lot of medical condition that left us wondering and struggling in the past are now become curable or at the very least it become manageable, it is so rapidly growing that the scientific advances have turned the natural process of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals. Even ‘antiaging’ (a loosely used term) has become a very popular topic and billion dollars worth of researches were made for this solely purpose of slowing down aging process. What we may forget is that aging and dying is not our enemy, it is not a failure. It is a natural order of things. There is no escaping the tragedy of life that we are all aging since the very first day we were born. As a doctor this book has remind me that it is important to see a patient as a complete human being, to recognise them not only by the disease that they have, but understanding the fear, the hope, and their priority at the very end of their lives.

“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 on Being Mortal