Death is a clear-cut objective moment, but the process of dying and the choices we make for our own death and others is a wholly different subject.
Not becoming educated on your ability to influence your dying process is leaving that potentially long helpless period to fate. Raw and informative, this book explores the truth and asserts your right to knowledge and your right to say "No" to medical procedures that ultimately only prolong suffering once imminent and inevitable death arrives.
What can be done to decrease unnecessary suffering before inevitable death? This suffering is almost always influenced by a fear or lack of acceptance of death. For the most part the healthcare field cannot stop this pain and suffering due to many influences beyond its control, unless you know how to protect yourself. Ultimately, it is up to the patient or their medical guardian to ensure a peaceful and dignified death.
It is obvious Vincent cares deeply about your awareness, knowledge, and choices, as well as your control of your body and your own health care. He cares to see your fears of this often dark and taboo subject decreased and hopefully alleviated. His professional and personal caring perspectives come from twenty-one years of bedside emergency and intensive care nursing in teaching hospitals, followed by fourteen more years of advocating for both the dying and the living to pilot their own health care. He takes a look at an otherwise bitterly-avoided subject that we all must face and turns it into a highly informative, easy, and at times even funny to read.
There is a sweet icing on this normally hard-to-stomach cake known as dying, death, and grief: the author also has some great input on how not only to stay alive longer, but to feel more alive.
Dodd, Vincent: - Vincent Dodd was born and raised in the swamps and marsh lands of southeast Louisiana and now resides in Austin, Texas. After Vincent graduated from Louisiana Tech University's Nursing School in 1985, he entered what he likes to call his "nursing residency," by working for three years in the emergency department in Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans. During those years he worked closely with LSU and Tulane residents and highly experienced nurses that all taught each other every chance they had.He knew at an early age that he had a service driven heart and a need to help and educate. He spent nineteen of his twenty-one-years in teaching hospital emergency departments and two of those years in intensive care. Vincent then left nursing and entered a twelve-year career in law enforcement to answer his lifelong curiosity of law enforcement and to study the field from the inside out from a solution-based angle. After over thirty-three-years of hands-on assistance to people in some level of personal crisis on an individual basis, he now feels driven to contribute on a larger scale through his writing and public speaking. His desire to always seek the origin of an issue and not to just place a surface bandage on the issue has helped him study the many causes to personal and social issues from a human behavior standpoint.Vincent has witnessed that many of our problems are related to the changes in social structure and personal views that has caused us to believe we no longer need each other, leading to a false sense of total independence from others. He has a driving passion to reverse our increasingly fragmented society, which leads fragments individuals, which then leads to our escalating numbers of depression, anxiety, addictions, suicide attempts, and suicides. Vincent Dodd is the author of Suffer Less in Life & Work, Suffer Less in Death, and is the Founder of The Yandle, John D., Sheehan, and Daigle Foundation, also known as The Human Bonding Foundation.
