Dennis Potter Quotes

'Incurable' is a tough word. So is 'terminal.'

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

In 1962 I was diagnosed with this incurable disease.

A doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn't pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.

Hospice means end-of-life care. The admission ticket is a diagnosis from a doctor that you have six months or less to live.

When I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65.

Unless they've had some experience with it, the hospice is still a mystery to most people. Because hospice deals with death, people tend not to talk about it.

In quixotically trying to conquer death doctors all too frequently do no good for their patients' ease but at the same time they do harm instead by prolonging and even magnifying patients' dis-ease.

A long disease seems to be a halting place between life and death, that death itself may be a comfort to those who die and to those who are left behind.

My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more.

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

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.

I think I definitely got scared by the second or third time a doctor told me I was dying.

I realized not long ago that by the time I leave this Earth, no matter when it is I will have officially only spent approximately 14 years of my life where I did not have to deal with cancer.

Having been an oncologist and having cared for scores, if not hundreds, of dying patients, when you don't have a treatment that can shrink the tumor and the patient will die, it's a very difficult conversation. It's emotionally draining.

I accept the dying process. I would just like to be as healthy as I possibly can at each step and phase along the way.

In health care today, we spend most of the dollars - in terms of treating disease - in the last two years of a person's life.

The doctor who diagnosed me with ALS, or motor neuron disease, told me that it would kill me in two or three years.

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

Hospice has brought such a light in my life. It is something I will be involved with until I need hospice myself.

I would like to avoid dying if possible. I do like living! The worst, I think for me, though, would be a really bedridden death.

My parents never told me about Papa's lung cancer or the desperate nature of the operations he was about to undergo, which were a last-ditch effort to contain the spread of his cancer.

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.

In medicine you go from dying to chronically ill. You don't go from dying to better than you ever knew you could be. That just doesn't happen.

We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.