Dying Is a Hard Thing to Do: Cancer and American Medicine

Dying is a Hard Thing To Do is a personal account of a loved one's death due to cancer and her struggle with the American medical system. We rely on our professional medical caregivers to provide truthful information and advice to help match personal choices with medical alternatives and realities, especially when we must make difficult end of life decisions. What happens when our doctors avoid such difficult discussions? When they refuse to describe the progression of the disease and the likelihood the proposed treatment will be successful? When they make deliberate efforts to deny their patients direct communications with their doctor? When they withhold information or deliberately provide incomplete or misleading information? Worse, when the doctor's avoidance of patient interaction, combined with an aggressive curative approach leads not to recovery but to shock, when the patient is finally told she has "just a few weeks" to live.

Excerpt from Dying is a Hard Thing To Do

As the night wore on I grew increasingly concerned that no one was in charge. Sitting in the dark, hearing Patty breathe, thinking about the problems we were having, I felt worried and frustrated by my inability to do anything about them. It seemed that there were too many doctors involved, almost always someone different, all of them potentially writing orders for drugs and tests. There seemed to be many things on which they did not agree.