Quote of the day
“Last week, I attended the funeral of one of my uncles. His irresponsible lifestyle, which included eating meat, smoking, drinking alcohol and ignoring sell by dates, resulted in his life being cut short at the age of 94.” Source
Blues dispersal initiative
We’ve just read in the Guardian that today is reckoned to be the most depressing of the year. Gosh. If you are sitting in a puddle of seasonal misery and wretchedness, this may cheer you up: I recently changed primary care physician. After a comprehensive history and physical exam and a bunch of lab tests, […]
Doc, how long have I got?
This will interest some of you at least — the more numerate and analytical. It’s an online diagnostic tool to determine longevity. Here’s the rationale as described by the New York Times: To help prevent overtesting and overtreatment of older patients — or undertreatment for those who remain robust at advanced ages — medical guidelines […]
Timing your exit
Posted by Charles Cowling Extracted from an article in yesterday’s New York Times: I hope you had the chance to read and reread Dudley Clendinen’s splendid essay, “The Good Short Life”. Clendinen is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. If he uses all the available medical technology, it will leave him, in a few years’ […]
The terrifying price of too-long life
If you like waking up to war, famine, pestilence and people shouting at each other you like Radio 4. Oddly, I do. This morning I emerged from a day-denying doze to hear medical people warning of the cancerous perils of alcohol, even small amounts of it. You too perhaps. Chilling stuff. The advice seems to […]
A time to die
Every week in the Spectator magazine Peter Jones takes an occurrence or development in contemporary society and politics and considers it in the light of what the ancients did when faced with the same circumstances. This week he considers the art of dying. I’d now bung you a link but I can’t: the Speccie does not […]
Pulling the plug
I know I go on about this, but I think it important. Long, long life is getting to be a problem. Thirty years ago dying was a relatively brief, often unexpected episode. Clever medics can now prolong it – intolerably and expensively. That last goodbye for most of us just keeps getting put off and […]
Naughty nineties
If you catch me reflecting too often on the travails of too-long life, this story may act as an antidote. It reminds me of a crisis faced by Winston Churchill. I can only paraphrase. An aide greeted him with the news, one morning, that a member of the cabinet had been found consorting in St James’s […]
At the end
I was struck by the sweetness of this in the Victoria Times Colonist (Deaths and Funerals): “Life provides a puzzle for us when we outlive our friends, when we forget our memories, and when the new technologies pass us by, but we are ever loved when we remember our manners and treat others with love […]
The terrible price of longevity
Here’s an incredibly powerful and superbly written account from the New York Times about the consequences of life-extending interventions by medics. It begins: One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey […]
