A grandmother hits the accelerator instead of the brake, landing her in a neighbor’s backyard. A group discussion of an 18th-century dying man with narrow-minded medical students. A grandfather over 100 years old riding a horse on his farm daily. What do these stories all have in common? They’re all things Atul Gawande witnessed before and details in his book, Being Mortal. By incorporating his many stories with research, history, and interviews, he makes the book immersive, allowing me to imagine the day it could happen to me or someone I know.
Being Mortal is a book about aging, and how doctors and caregivers are so untrained in caring for the elderly. The author peels back the layers of America’s norms by challenging the public’s mindset on medicine and what that means for the elderly. He incorporates modern, detailed stories of people he met, so vivid that I imagined them as my neighbors across the street. In addition, he is thorough with each story, keeping the same amount of details with the often uncomfortable truth. This gave me an extremely altered sense of the topic. For example, I met Bella and Felix, an old couple who retired from their medical practices. Bella becomes blind over time and Felix takes care of her at home. But, with disaster after disaster, like a common cold that ruptured both of her eardrums, turning her deaf, and a sudden fall, Bella needed to be put in a nursing home full-time with constant help from nurses. Things are looking up for her; she regains part of her hearing, is getting her casts off, and can begin moving back to her home under the care of Felix. But she never gets to see that through; “four days after the casts came off, four days after she’d begun walking again, she died” (Gawande 82). This abruptness, the frailty of life that most people like to avoid, stays constant throughout the book. His way of storytelling, going through to the end, made his message hit home, as if I just witnessed this happen to my loved one.
Not all of the stories Gawande shares are this tragic, but they always amplify the impact of everything else he shares. They are examples of the many flaws in the treatment of old age and chronic diseases. Each chapter has multiple stories, but by jumping around – he reveals more about the people as the reader’s knowledge grows – I can better understand what they’re going through. He adds history and carefully placed information, whether that be from an expert in the field or a personal experience from his practice. By taking the time to explain the little details, he gave me a chance to fully understand the meaning of the stories he chose to share. This made my reading experience much more immersive as I knew the wrongdoings and the implications of each situation. Instead of treating the people in the stories as just examples, I connected with each person, making reading the book much more interesting. This ties into the theme that Gawande puts lots of effort into; going the extra mile to understand who these people are makes a difference.
In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande details the many issues with healthcare for the elderly, and he focuses on looking at a person as a whole. Through using detailed stories that convey powerful messages, he reminded me that patients are people with their own needs and opinions. What is medically best for the patient often isn’t what the patient wants. For example, we meet Alice, the grandma who ran her car into her neighbor's backyard, again in Chapter 3 which is about life in nursing homes. She’s much different than how she was in Chapter 1 where she drove her car to get groceries and lived fine alone. Now, she lives in an accommodating nursing home that gives her kids some peace of mind – but to her, it’s the same as a prison. From Gawande's interview with Alice, “There was so much more that she felt she could do in her life. ‘I want to be helpful, play a role,’ she said… Now, her main activities were bingo and DVD movies” (Gawande 162). He humanizes the elderly by putting himself in their shoes, taking the chance to fully understand their situations. Through Gawande’s storytelling, I could put myself in a world new to me, but I also realized that it’s the same world that would someday be mine if nothing changes. By doing thorough research, interviewing the people that he meets, and retelling his stories in an organized manner, Being Mortal encapsulates what it means to live for the elderly.
-Max
No comments:
Post a Comment