Mark Hunt Quotes

I had first-hand experience watching my father's health decline over the stretch of 13 years.

My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain.

We could keep his body going, but it was trying its hardest to die.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

My father's death from prostate cancer in 1993 was tragic. He never complained about pain. He was a fighter. By the time he was ready to die he wasn't able to die in the way that he wanted to, which seemed an outrage to me.

Americans of all ages deserve quality end-of-life medical care.

First-class delivery of children's palliative care is life-changing. When families are confronted with the shattering news that their children have a life-limiting condition, their world can fall apart.

My mother battled cancer for 12 years before losing her fight.

Bodily discomfort and emotional fear and attachment make the dying uncomfortable and fearful. So, to help those dying people, I think modern medical science has a lot of facilities to reduce pain, or perhaps not to reduce pain, but not to experience pain.

Before he died, my dad had three primary cancers over 20 years, and for four of those years, he was having chemo every day. We got used to sitting as a family at the table and him not to be able to taste what we were tasting.

We could move catalog, if he'd only die quicker.

"I'm going over the valley." (Dying from throat cancer, his doctor found him wandering around his room, asked him where was he going?)

Many, if not most, Americans can imagine a fate worse than death, and it is a seemingly interminable process of dying. For them, it is frightening that politicians can find ways to interject themselves into this sad process.

Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die.

A lot of people spend their last decade of their lives in pain and misery combating disease.

Illness and death are not optional. Patients have a right to determine how they approach them.

When you go through a long illness, certainly one of cancer, there's a certain release from it and relief that it has come to an end, because the suffering can be unbearable, as opposed to an abrupt stop to life when they go out the door and there's a loved one who never comes home because of some accident.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

My mother did not want cancer to interfere with my life, as she knew it would eventually end hers.

Hospice is such a tremendous thing. Patients seem to reach an inner peace.

He had Parkinson's disease for about, I'd say diagnosed for about 11 of the last years of his life. And treatment was not as good as it is now, of course. We're still going along and he died in '85 and he was 77.

You can actually be bored stiff while you're dying.

I mean some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to their funeral.

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.

When death is imminent and dying patients find their suffering unbearable, then the physician's role should shift from healing to relieving suffering in accord with the patient's wishes.