Jim Nantz Quotes

A few months before my dad died, his eyes had started to go, and his skin was turning green. When he finally went to hospital, he was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer. None of us kids knew why the old man ignored the doctors and refused their help, but none of us were surprised, either.

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.

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 husband Don's mother, Denise, was diagnosed with cancer, and she was given eight months to live. We decided to go and stay there and help live her days with her, 'cause you don't get those chances again, right?

As my father went through a really, really long and dark period of his health declining and falling deeper into the abyss, I knew I was never going to let my family and my children experience this without any long-term care.

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 all have somebody in our lives, that however closely related or not, is affected by terminal illness and these amazing nurses, who often work through the night with people, not only suffering from a terminal illness but their families, they're just extraordinary people.

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

My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.

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.

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.

We have lost close friends and relatives to cancer and Parkinson's disease, and the level of personal suffering inflicted on patients and their families by these diseases is horrific.

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.

For months before he passed, my dad would have terrible night sweats, and soak through his sheets, often several times a night. Each time, mom would gently roll him over, replace the sheets, and roll him back - then spend the whole next day washing several sets of sheets, only to repeat the routine each night.

Few years ago when I visited a palliative care centre in Chennai for the first time, it completely moved me. It's an emotionally draining experience. I saw and met patients who were abandoned by their families, and there is complete sense of hopelessness. Ever since, I have been a supporter for the need for funding and awareness of palliative care.

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.

My dad was suffering with cancer for six years and my mum was in coma for three-and-a-half months. So, I have seen the hospital life.

My dad's dying wish was to have his family around him. I can't help thinking he would have been better off with more oxygen.

In the last stages of a final illness, we need only the absence of pain and the presence of family.

My ultimate aim is to make euthanasia a positive experience.

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.

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 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.