
Hard Choices for Loving People
CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures, and the Patient with a Serious Illness, 6th Ed.
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By:
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Hank Dunn
About this listen
Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures, and the Patient with a Serious Illness, Sixth Edition is a guide to help patients and families with end-of-life decisions. Millions of families have been helped and comforted by the common sense and practical advice found in this audiobook.
Hank Dunn draws on his extensive experience as a chaplain in a nursing home, hospice program, and hospital. In Hard Choices for Loving People, he shares stories of many of the patients and families he has helped guide through this most difficult time.
Living with a life-threatening illness presents challenges and difficulties few can imagine or even think about. Family members are confronted with making extraordinarily difficult decisions, often in the midst of emotionally draining circumstances.
The audiobook is also based on research, offering reliable, relevant medical advice from top medical journals and experts. In the very first moments, the listener is encouraged to first consider the goals of medical care. What is the appropriate medical goal for this patient at this phase of life? Is it to cure, stabilize functioning, or to prepare for a comfortable and dignified death?
The first chapter deals with CPR resuscitation attempts. The second chapter addresses the issues surrounding artificial feeding tubes. Also covered in Hard Choices for Loving People are medical treatments such as palliative care, hospice, hospitalization, respirators (breathing machines), dialysis, antibiotics, pacemakers and implanted defibrillators, and pain control.
In several places throughout the audiobook, special attention is given to making these decisions for people with dementia. The concluding moments of the audiobook address the emotional and spiritual concerns at the end of life. People of any faith or of no faith tradition have found these words helpful.
Chaplain Dunn feels the journey at the final stages of life is a journey to letting go and letting be. As end-of-life care expert Ira Byock, MD, attests, this audiobook is packed with practical wisdom for people facing life's most difficult decisions. It is clear and concise, yet sensitive to the emotional turmoil of the people who hold it in their hands.
©2016 Hank Dunn (P)2018 Hank DunnListeners also enjoyed...
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What listeners say about Hard Choices for Loving People
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- unicornmedic
- 07-15-21
Hard Choices for Loving People
This is one of the BEST books to have open discussions with patients, families & staff.
It is very informational regarding end of life choices.
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- Vivian
- 11-26-22
So very helpful to me
Despite having read several books of this nature, this book, presenting some new thoughts and ways of thinking about the end of life. Having recently lost my mother and having done all the right things thanks to Hospice early intervention I can’t emphasize how important a book like this is for everyone.
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