Tag Archives: dying

Week 12: Extreme Measures at the End of Life

*Watch Extremis documentary on Netflix (24 min)
*Pearson, No Acute Distress (pgs 205-250)

For this week’s class, I created an End of Life Jeopardy designed to help guide our conversation about hospice and palliative medicine and end of life narratives. I decided that jeopardy would be a playful way for us to cover a lot of ground about difficult conversation topics. Categories included Goals, Quality of Life, Ethics, Faith, Health Equity, and we talked about narratives at the bedside and in society about death. We did not keep track of points or have any winning teams. Instead, we divided into groups of three and each small group discussed each question together before sharing their conversation with the whole group. Students found that the jeopardy format worked well and allowed us to unpack many of the topics introduced by the readings and by the Extremis documentary.

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Filed under Narrative Medicine and Health Inequity

[Pulse] On Earth As It Is in Heaven

I don’t know what prompted me to take this picture. In retrospect, I imagine this is what death looks like, or feels like. On death’s door, the vast promise of something more (perhaps heaven) lies ahead–pure and natural, mysterious in its perfection. But there are things that hold us back, stopping us like a red light. Eventually, something’s got to give.

on earth as it is in heaven

This photograph was featured in Pulse–Voices from the Heart of Medicine.

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Filed under Miscellaneous Musings, Uncategorized, Visualizing Illness