Between Life and Death

While we know life is temporary, that tends to lose meaning when it comes to making medical decisions for loved ones. Dr Sunita Puri makes an impressive debut as she weaves this awareness into her writing, documenting her experiences of caring for terminally-ill patients. A physician who has had a front seat in the United States’ palliative care system, Puri writes about people at their most vulnerable, wary of accepting her medical help-offering comfort when no cure is possible.

Puri has two sides. She’s an empathic, calm physician who deals with worst-case scenarios and has tough conversations about when to pull the plug, while also being a sensitive daughter who is steered into medicine by her doctor mother and engineer father. Puri grapples with these two sides as she takes readers through complications that arise in and out of the ICU.

The book is flooded with dilemmas: What makes a good doctor? Is it one who keeps a patient alive regardless of the consequences, or one who determines whether or not the life sustained would be acceptable to the patient? She probes the kind of decision-making that is not taught at med school, but which humans intuitively understand. You can feel her frustration when she tries to explain her role to her colleagues, her parents and grieving families.

Puri makes you feel (and sometimes sob), but most importantly, she does the hard work of bringing humanity to medicine. Her commitment to normalising conversations about death, and telling stories about what quality-of-life and dying-with-dignity can mean for patients in their last moments, makes this book a must-read for healthcare professionals everywhere.

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