This Is Assisted Dying
A Doctor's Story of Empowering Patients at the End of Life
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
An international bestseller, this compassionate memoir by a leading pioneer in medically assisted dying who helps suffering patients explore and fulfill their end of life choices is “written with sensitivity, grace, and candor...not to be missed” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Dr. Stefanie Green has been forging new paths in the field of medical assistance in dying since 2016. In her landmark memoir, Dr. Green reveals the reasons a patient might seek an assisted death, how the process works, what the event itself can look like, the reactions of those involved, and what it feels like to oversee proceedings and administer medications that hasten death. She describes the extraordinary people she meets and the unusual circumstances she encounters as she navigates the intricacy, intensity, and utter humanity of these powerful interactions.
Deeply authentic and powerfully emotional, This Is Assisted Dying contextualizes the myriad personal, professional, and practical issues surrounding assisted dying by bringing readers into the room with Dr. Green, sharing the voices of her patients, her colleagues, and her own narrative. As our population confronts issues of wellness, integrity, agency, community, and how to live a connected, meaningful life, this progressive and compassionate book by a physician at the forefront of medically assisted dying offers comfort and potential relief.
“A humane, clear-eyed view of how and why one can leave the world by choice” (Kirkus Reviews), This Is Assisted Dying will change the way people think about their options, and ultimately is less about death than about how we wish to live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Physician Green chronicles in this stunning account her work in the assisted dying field after Canada passed its Medical Assistance in Dying bill in 2016. Through stories of her many patients, she reflects on her work "bringing about death" in Vancouver Island, the area in Canada with "the highest percentage of assisted death." One woman with advanced metastatic breast cancer, for example, had eating and mobility issues as well as progressive pain, made worse by having watched her mother and two sisters die of cancer before her: "I know what's coming next and I'd rather skip it," she concluded. Another man declared, "I want to do it my way. I want to have my friends over... maybe even sneak a sip of a beer." Much like her patients, Green avoids cloying sentimentality and gets straight at the heart of the matter with compassion and force: "We're going to talk about death today, and we're going to talk about dying... I'm going to talk about these things quite frankly," she tells one patient. Green gives a personal voice to a contentious topic, making a memorable case that death is a "mark of our humanity." Written with sensitivity, grace, and candor, this is not to be missed.
