Being Immortal Analysis

As a result of reading Dr. Atul Gawande’s Being Immortal, I found myself contemplating old age and end of life care from a couple different angles, which I suppose was the goal of Gawande while writing his book. As it turns out, I knew very little about end of life care before reading this book, but now feel as though I have some guidance to at least begin thinking about what that should look like. Not only did this book encourage me to think about my own mortality, but also that of my loved ones. I was somewhat forced to think about how I would want to live the last years of my life, if I knew how my parents wanted to live, and compare those ideals to the reality of how our current society treats those living through the ending years of their
Reading about her experience made me wonder what I would do in her position. After surviving multiple chemotherapy treatments with no results, would I want to continue to try to extend my life in painful ways or just essentially “give up” on treatment and just live my life out as long as naturally possible. Then again at that point, what quality of life are you really living? In theory to what is logical, I would say I would want to end treatment once I no longer had a good quality of life, which to me would mean when I no longer had autonomy or when there was a significant amount of pain for the majority of my days; in addition, if I got to this point, I might even consider thinking about ‘death with dignity’. However, one can not really say what they would do until they are actually put in that situation; I have a feeling that in reality, I would follow the path of Sara in continuing multiple treatments in an attempt to extend my life even if my quality of life decreased