Mike Gallagher Quotes

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

This has been harder for my friends. I know I'm going to die.

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?

If I learnt anything at all about terminal illness in my research, it's that the experience is different for everyone. I do believe that life becomes concentrated when it's boundaried and that death is the biggest boundary of all.

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.

Cancer victims who don't accept their fate, who don't learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left.

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.

When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, my middle school friends and myself really had no idea the impact of that diagnosis, but my family did.

The bulk of my learning - if I may call it such - has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns, one gently comes upon his own strengths and shortcomings.

I had a personal experience of my mum being in comatose state in 2004. I would go to the hospital every day but would not do anything. I would just meet the doctor for five minutes who would update me about her.

I have sat with countless patients and families to discuss grim prognoses: It's one of the most important jobs physicians have. It's easier when the patient is 94, in the last stages of dementia, and has a severe brain bleed. For young people like me - I am 36 - given a diagnosis of cancer, there aren't many words.

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.

It's very interesting, I had an extremely intense experience with my dad in 2002, when he was an old man and very ill and I was taking care of him and my mother, and he was extremely depressed, virtually lost the will to live, and I realized my main job was cheering him up to save his life.

When you know that someone close to you is going to die, there's a natural tendency to want to spend as much time with them as you can.

Dementia is quite unlike cancer or heart disease or any of those other conditions where you bargain with God for a cure or even just a bit more time.

Death is a fact of life, no matter where you live. Taking care of the dying is a necessity everywhere. Those are not conditions exclusive to small towns.

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

I lost a very dear friend who lived with AIDS for about 17 years. Rejecting early treatments that were iffy, he thought he saved himself. I really miss him a lot.

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

I think everyone's experience with a terminal disease is so deeply personal and unique to the person, the context in which they're living and the relationships that they have.

You can't tell a 6-year-old your sister is going to die.

I think there is, in our society, there is a growing fear of death, a fear of the circumstances in which I might die, a fear I might be over-treated or under-treated. But fear is always a bad guide. Death is part of life.

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.