That Good Night

Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour

De: Sunita Puri

Narrado por: Soneela Nankani, Sunita Puri

“A profound exploration of what it means for all of us to live—and to die—with dignity and purpose.” —People

“Visceral and lyrical.” —The Atlantic

As the American born daughter of immigrants, Dr. Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents' experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Between days spent waiting for her mother, an anesthesiologist, to exit the OR, and evenings spent in conversation with her parents about their faith, Puri witnessed the tension between medicine's impulse to preserve life at all costs and a spiritual embrace of life's temporality. And it was that tension that eventually drew Puri, a passionate but unsatisfied medical student, to palliative medicine--a new specialty attempting to translate the border between medical intervention and quality-of-life care.

Interweaving evocative stories of Puri's family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.

I liked and wanted more

This was a wonderful collection of stories of the lives and deaths of some of her patients, and tells the timeline of her experience transitioning into paliative care. It is all well done, even to the aound and cadence of the authors voice. I would have preferred to have more didactic teaching about the HOW to have conversations with dying patients and their families. The WHYs were clear throughout the book. In the last chapter, she recalls her grand round lecture and mentions "pitfalls to avoid" when having said conversations, but does not identify them. That is what I wished the book extolled more- the nuts and bolts of how, what strategies to undertake and which to avoid, when talking with patients. The book is a solid A, but I believe more technical descriptions of the HOW would have made it an A+.

LOVED IT ! !

Great job. I could understand from both sides. Thank you for writing this book, as it is so needed still.

Life changing

I loved this book. I mean I’m not a huge fan of memoirs because they can come across as boastful. But this one was just well-rounded and thought provoking. Dr. Puri explains death in such a way that you don’t cringe at the mention of it, instead you slowly come to start changing the way your mind views death. I read this for a book club that I belong to and this is one of the books that I will list as having influenced my life.

Thank you, Dr. Puri for writing this!!

Enjoyed it very much!

What a lovely autobiography! I learned so much about Palliative care and what a difference it makes at the end of life. I hope more physicians will understand that it doesn’t mean they have failed but that it can be the helpful treatment in that last chapter of life, no matter how short or long that chapter is. The author is a wonderful physician! I hope she can influence others to be as helpful to their patients. Well written and well read.

More perspective on a difficulty subject

As a nurse, I strongly empathize with Dr. Puri and appreciate her struggles in spreading the awareness and understanding of palliative care. She reminds me that those who are caregivers by profession are, too, only human. We are not infallible; we cannot fix everything all the time; we should accept help from others. To me, an important part of our humanity is the ability to have a say in how we might exit this life. While having discussions about chronic illness, palliative medicine, and hospice care can be uncomfortable and challenging, they are necessary nonetheless.