John Hickenlooper Quotes

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?

My work as a doula also extends all the way to the end of life. I sit at the bedsides of people who are passing on in hospices or nursing homes, for the people and families who want that kind of thing.

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.

Hospice is such a tremendous thing. Patients seem to reach an inner peace.

I used to work as a volunteer in a hospice, but I don't have any nursing skills or cooking skills or anything, so I was what they call an escort. I would take people to the support groups every night, and I would have to sit sort of on the sidelines so I could take them back to hospice at the end of the meeting.

I accept the dying process. I would just like to be as healthy as I possibly can at each step and phase along the way.

The prime goal is to alleviate suffering, and not to prolong life. And if your treatment does not alleviate suffering, but only prolongs life, that treatment should be stopped.

Hospice has brought such a light in my life. It is something I will be involved with until I need hospice myself.

Unless they've had some experience with it, the hospice is still a mystery to most people. Because hospice deals with death, people tend not to talk about it.

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.

I had first-hand experience watching my father's health decline over the stretch of 13 years.

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.

Many, if not most, Americans can imagine a fate worse than death, and it is a seemingly interminable process of dying. For them, it is frightening that politicians can find ways to interject themselves into this sad process.

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

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

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

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.

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.

Americans of all ages deserve quality end-of-life medical care.

My wife Lucy was very sick for nearly three years prior to her death. At one time, I was in the hospital with her for six months.

When death is imminent and dying patients find their suffering unbearable, then the physician's role should shift from healing to relieving suffering in accord with the patient's wishes.

I have learned that delivering the best possible palliative care to children is vital, providing children and their families with a place of support, care and enhancement at a time of great need is simply life-changing.

Having been an oncologist and having cared for scores, if not hundreds, of dying patients, when you don't have a treatment that can shrink the tumor and the patient will die, it's a very difficult conversation. It's emotionally draining.

Death is not treatment, even if it's medically facilitated.