Nothing to Fear

I've been a subscriber to this author's YouTube channel for some time now and so I was really eager to read this book when it came out. I have experienced my own losses over the years including my father in 2011 and my mother in 2021. They both died of the kind of chronic illnesses of old age that this book focuses on. Part of the process is just trying to understand what is happening and what the future has for options. So I wanted to understand better what experiences people who suffer from serious illnesses late in life and their caregivers to compare with what I have seen. Whether it's how to decide whether to allow extraordinary means to prolong life, how to deal with severe pain, I don't have any pressing need to act on these things but I do feel as if there's no time like the present to think about what I will want in the end and to learn what those around me ought to think about before they might face approaching death.

The author has excellent credentials having years as a registered nurse including years with a hospice company, and is generous with sharing lessons learned along the way with her viewers, and now her readers. Numerous times she gives reassurance to those wondering whether what they themselves are seeing is commonplace, based on what she knows about her patients. There are some things the American medical system does well and there are others where it falls short, and the difficult things she saw working previously as a nurse in intensive care nurse led her to change her field to hospice care. I think the segment of the medical industry occupied by doctors and specialists has a tendency to turn to technology to lengthen lifespan, even without an assurance of the quality of life. We are reminded that for thousands of years, people did not die in hospitals surrounded by machines, but at home surrounded by people they cared about, who knew that death could come any time. This book aims to provide information to help people who need to work around the broken parts of the present system while keeping the good parts.

Step by step this book takes the reader through the basics of what hospice and palliative care are about, how they differ, and what kind of relief they can offer. It tries to dispel the veils around a terminal diagnosis and to empower patients and their loved ones with information so they can make the decisions aimed to preserve the best in life. It dispels misconceptions about death, based on actual experience, and it is not afraid to go into regions beyond hard objective facts about the end of life such as visioning, patients who can override the dying process by exercising their will, and the deathbed rally. In some ways, this is the brightest, most comforting part of the story it tells. But any spiritual aspect to this book is not in service to any particular religion. Again and again it hones in on the three most important things when death is unavoidable: the need to be clean, safe, and comfortable. Beyond these three pillars all of the other matters a dying person might be burdened with can pale.

A lot of this talk about dying can be scary, so I really want to recommend the audiobook version of this read by the author. Her calm, compassionate, and down to earth delivery really does a lot to make the difficult parts easier to take in. I expect to seeing this book become a classic manual to be updated as our understanding changes over the years.