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"In Dear Life, palliative care specialist Dr. Rachel Clarke recounts her professional and personal journey to understand not the end of life, but life at its end. Death was conspicuously absent during Rachel's medical training. Instead, her education focused entirely on learning to save lives, and was left wanting when it came to helping patients and their families face death. She came to specialize in palliative medicine because it is the one specialty in which the quality, not quantity of life truly matters. In the same year she started to work in a hospice, Rachel was forced to face tragedy in her own life when her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He'd inspired her to become a doctor, and the stories he had told her as a child proved formative when it came to deciding what sort of medicine she would practice. But for all her professional exposure to dying, she remained a grieving daughter. Dear Life follows how Rachel came to understand-as a child, as a doctor, as a human being-how best to help patients in the final stages of life, and what that might mean in practice"--… (more)
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Dear Life is part memoir, part meditation on medicine, death and dying.
Much of the first half focuses on Rachel Clarke’s personal life. After a short career in journalism, Clarke surrendered to the inevitable and commenced a degree in medicine,
As a palliative care doctor, Clarke believes the specialty demonstrates medicine at its very best, ‘placing patient, not disease, centre stage’. Like most I fear death, in part because I am terrified of an end of indignity, of pain, and suffering. Touching also on the ethical questions surrounding the common ‘life-at-all-cost’ practice of medicine, and the importance of Advanced Health Directives, Clarke explains how palliative care aims to address and alleviate those fears as much as possible. Clarke’s portrayal of her patients and their struggle to live, even while dying, is insightful and compassionate. With empathy and honesty the author shares the last days of some of her patients, who approach their end with a mixture of anger, understanding, fear, resignation, and often, perhaps surprisingly in the end, acceptance.
This becomes all the more important to Rachel when her beloved father, a G.P, is diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer, and when treatment proves unsuccessful, she does all she can to ease his demise.
Dear Life is a thoughtful, inspiring, and surprisingly comforting exploration of a subject most us find difficult to discuss, or even contemplate. The hard truth is, Death will one day come for us, and when it does, we will want palliative and hospice services that will facilitate, and advocate for, the inevitable end on our own terms.
Dr.Clarke (the author, who is also referred to as Rachel when she is talking about
There are multiple stories in this book that will make you cry, especially if you have been a hospital patient, have been in the hospital for numerous reasons, or have had someone you love be in the hospital and die there.
Since Dr.Clarke is based in the UK, there are multiple references to things that the UK has a different way of saying (compared to other countries in the world) which means it may be a bit harder for an international reader to read and fully understand everything without doing some research on certain words.
This isn't a book I could, or want to read in one day. It requires setting down multiple times and picking it back up again when you can. The chapter markers, while good to have, sometimes happen right in the middle of a story and all the reader will want to do is continue to read that story.
I'm sure this is a book that Dr.Clarke's patients and family can read, and be very proud of. If you every wonder what the life of a doctor is when someone is dying then pick up this book and read it.