Stop Living Life Like an Emergency or Embracing Our Mortality

Stop Living Life Like an Emergency!: Rescue Strategies for the Overworked and Overwhelmed

Author: Diane Sieg

Stop Living Life Like an Emergency is for anyone caught up in the fast lane of life, who feels under the gun, and doesn't know how to live any other way. We have too much to do and not enough time to do it. We're overwhelmed, we're feeling the stress, our days are in chaos, and we don't know how to change the toxic habits that ruin our lives. Diane Sieg, a 20-year emergency room veteran and certified Lifestyle Counselor, says that it's time we deal with stress as the life-threatening affliction it is. After seeing thousands of crisis situations, she has come to realize that we create a lot of our own emergencies by trying to do too much, too fast, too often. Stop Living Life Like an Emergency explains how you can rejuvenate your life, increase your time, and rediscover the joy of living. Sieg shows you how to overcome your life-threatening lifestyle and build the future you want.

Stop Living Life Like an Emergency is a no-non-sense, down-to-earth guide. It's full of anecdotes, case studies, self-assessment quizzes, personal experiences, and proven action plans that Sieg has developed for her clients. Emergency living stirs up spiritual crises, too. We don't have the time or energy for the things that matter most -- our loved ones, our passions, our own souls. Sieg explains how to find "The Agonizing Gift" that opens the door to healing your pain and reclaiming your spirit. In this book Sieg shares the secrets that over 30,000 people have praised at her lectures and keynote addresses across the nation. Finally -- an antidote for emergency living that makes sense!

Table of Contents:

	Introduction	xiii
Chapter 1	Emergency Living	1
Chapter 2	Triage	15
Chapter 3	Assessment	29
Chapter 4	Hyperventilation	41
Chapter 5	Changing Status	51
Chapter 6	The Treatment Plan	61
Chapter 7	The Overdose	73
Chapter 8	The Adrenaline Junkie	89
Chapter 9	Inserting a Pacemaker	99
Chapter 10	The Disaster Plan	107
Chapter 11	Universal Precautions	117
Chapter 12	Take a Break	129
Chapter 13	The Pain Scale	143
Chapter 14	Discharge Instructions	155
	Recommended Reading	173
	Bibliography	177
	Index	181

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Embracing Our Mortality: Hard Choices in an Age of Medical Miracles

Author: Lawrence J Schneiderman

While surveys show that most of us would prefer to die at home, 80% of us will die in a health care facility, many hooked up to machines and faced with tough decisions. When you, a family member, or a friend are in this situation, what should you do next? In Embracing Our Mortality, Dr. Lawrence J. Schneiderman, a physician who is our leading expert on medical ethics at the end of life, urges all of us, including health care professionals caring for people at the end of life, to face these decisions with sensitivity and realism informed by both the latest medical evidence as well as the oldest humanistic visions. Dr. Schneiderman vividly demonstrates the wisdom of this approach by interweaving true stories of his patients, current empirical research in care at the end of life, displays of the power of empathy and imagination as embodied in the work of writers like Tolstoy and Chekov, and examples of how the distortion of medical research by media, and its misunderstanding even by health care professionals, cloud the ability to think, feel, and decide clearly about mortal concerns. He ends by addressing the question implicit in all of this which is how to achieve a just and universal health care.
Dr. Schneiderman proves a refreshingly honest, astringent, and life-affirming guide to thinking about the choices that we or people we love will face when we dienot if, as the technological imperatives of modern medicine can suggestand to making decisions at the end of life that respect all that has preceded it.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer:Sarah Hetue Hill, MA(St. Louis University Center for Health Care Ethics)
Description:Dr. Lawrence Schneiderman, respected physician and well known expert on ethics at the end of life, presents this book as a guide for wading through the chaos that occurs when having to make difficult decisions at the end of life.
Purpose:The book provides readers with the tools necessary to navigate treatment decisions that will occur during our own serious illnesses and those of our loved ones. As suggested in the preface, although most of us would prefer to die at home, a large majority of us will die in a healthcare facility hooked up to a myriad of machines and devices. This book is a timely and needed response to society's current immersion in the milieu of the technological imperative.
Audience:This is appropriate for a broad audience and is written in a manner that will be accessible to many, including those unfamiliar with medical terminology or ethics. The book also provides enough relevant information on the topics of empathy and empirical research to be useful to healthcare professionals whose patients are facing these intricate decisions.
Features:Throughout the book, the author recounts cases from his own practice as well as famous cases to illuminate his points. He provides a useful chapter on completing advance directives and another on how to accurately assess facts and statistics on treatment outcomes. He also incorporates literary references from Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Tolstoy into the text, and provides an appendix with poems by William Carlos Williams and Anne Sexton. The author concludes with achapter addressing additional recent concerns in healthcare, including the need to provide universal healthcare and the inexorableness of rationing healthcare.
Assessment:This book is engaging, due in large part to the case studies and literary references. The concise arrangement of short chapters with numerous references makes the book manageable, but substantial enough to be valuable. The honest and realistic information is a welcome alternative to the inaccurate depictions of the end of life provided by the media.

Library Journal

As medical advances and lifestyle changes carry more and more Americans beyond the age of 80, decisions about quality of life and manner of death grow increasingly unavoidable. Schneiderman (Univ. of California at San Diego Medical Sch.) and geriatrician McCullough (The Little Black Book of Geriatrics ) remind us that the issues surrounding decline and death are not isolated, spectacular events happening to others, as in the Terri Schiavo case, but a part of all our lives. Here, they each discuss the need for advanced planning and thoughtful communication and care.

Schneiderman emphasizes the need for clear and current advance directives to balance the tendency of modern medicine, abetted by hopeful loved ones, to continue treatments to the detriment of the patient's comfort. Using many literary references (this M.D. is also a novelist, a short story writer, and a playwright) and calling on philosophy as well as science, Schneiderman argues that physicians need to work from an "ethic of care" that gives equal status to the relief of suffering and the restoration of health.

McCullough's concept of "slow medicine" is an example of that ethic of care in action. Having worked through these issues himself with his own mother's death, he here guides families as they move with an aging relative along what he calls the "eight stations of late life" preceding death. McCullough believes communication at this time is essential, and he emphasizes gentle, low-impact, and thoughtful care from the first signs of the body or mind's decline. Often, he points out, elderly patients can benefit more from attentive listening, conversation, touch, and a reduction in medications than fromacute interventions. Good additions to such works as Ira Byock's Dying Well , both these books are recommended for public libraries.-Dick Maxwell, Porter Adventist Hosp. Lib., Denver

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