A hospital death can be a good death
Our culture wrongly views a death in the ICU as a failure.
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Sometimes intensive care is the right place to care for a dying patient, says the writer.
PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO
Daniela J. Lamas
What is a good death? We tend to imagine a good death as one that takes place at home, far from the sounds and smells and lines and tubes of an intensive care unit (ICU), like the one where I work.
I believed this for many years. But after a decade as an ICU doctor, I’ve come to think we need a different definition of a good death.