The End-of-Life Advisor: Personal, Legal, and Medical Considerations for a Peaceful, Dignified Death

The End-of-Life Advisor: Personal, Legal, and Medical Considerations for a Peaceful, Dignified Death

By: Susan Dolan   Audrey R Vizzard  

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Average Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5

If you’re a healthcare or legal professional, you’ll discover the important ways you can advise your patients and clients. If you’re caring for a loved one, you’ll learn how you can help make their last days much more comfortable. If you’re planning for yourself, you’ll understand the decisions you need to make now – so you can find greater peace down the road.

You’ll get basic practical information on the ways a person can make their wishes known and maintain control over their end-of-life experience. This includes living wills, power of attorney for healthcare, Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders, choosing hospice care, managing pain, increasing comfort ad making after-death plans.

Along the way you’ll find inspirational, emotional, and often humorous stories of positive end-of-life experiences – where pain and fear were replaced with comfort and peace.

Publisher: Kaplan Publishing

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Excellent guide to final preparations - Now that I have a wonderful 23-year old son that I've adopted into my life, it was time to very quickly get him protected with life insurance on me and prepare wills, living wills, and powers of attorney.

This is an outstanding book, and I'd recommend it to everyone that loves their family and friends. What can be a worse thing to condemn your loved ones to than to have to make agonizing decisions if you're suddenly hit with a heart attack, stroke, aneurysm, or other catastrophic illness or accident? Make your wishes known to them now, before the need arises for them to make decisions without your guidance.

I found this book terribly reassuring. It looks at end of life issues, preparing your affairs, what to expect from hospice care, etc. Did you know that people that spend their final days in hospice actually tend to live happier, longer lives than a hospital setting? It's all about comfort and relief from pain, not curing the incurable. Freed from painful and agonizing treatments, patients actually do quite well with palliative care and usually recover their appetite and some strength. Who knew?

The book is quite detailed, yet actually fascinating to read and hard to put down. Buy the book. You'll feel great about end of life, whether your own or preparing yourself for the death of a loved one. My own mother is 84, and this book went very far toward relieving my worries about her care, as well.

Get the book. You'll be glad you did.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A great book about life, love, and the gift of hospice care! - Hospice doesn't care for dying patients; it cares for living patients! It cares for patients who need not just pain management and vital information, but compassionate, personal, heartfelt care.

I met one of the co-authors of "The End of Life Advisor," Susan Dolan, at a hospice conference where we were both speakers, before I ever read her book. I was impressed by her outlook, her passion, her eagerness to make a difference in people's lives, and I was determined to read the book! Granted, I was also a bit apprehensive: I expected a grim, depressing, encyclopedic book that would be informative, but difficult (and unpleasant) to read. And I was wrong.

"The End of Life Advisor" is certainly informative, but it's neither grim nor depressing. How can that possibly be, you ask? It's because this book is full of uplifting, exciting, sometimes even funny stories that celebrate life! Surely it's a book that's informative about important issues, such as managing pain, the value and experience of hospice, creating a will or planning a funeral. But it's also a book full of dialogue so compelling it often reads like a novel! You'll eavesdrop as Vincent tells Ira, a hospice volunteer, about storming Omaha Beach on D-Day; you'll chuckle at Art Buchwald's experience with hospice; you'll almost taste the raspberry tea with honey as you visit with Big Bess and Little Bess! It's clear that this is a personal, intimately written book by two authors with a wealth of experience with hospice care.

Who should read "The End of Life Advisor"? Hospice staff and volunteers will definitely grab a copy; they'll see themselves and their patients through the pages, and reaffirm the importance and meaning of everything they do. Family members of loved ones who had the good fortune of being in the care of hospice angels will laugh, cry, and celebrate their family members' lives in every page. But this is truly a book for everyone with a friend or family member who died from an illness, and a book for everyone who may one day die themselves (I'm stubbornly avoiding death myself, but I suspect my turn might eventually come too). The information will make a world of difference, and the stories will help anyone look at life (not just death) in a different light. What a great read!

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
End of Life Advisor - I read The End-of-Life Advisor in less than a day and found it more than just a bit engaging! Over and over, as I read I floated back to my husband's death. I feel pretty good about how we handled his dying, but if I had had this book, I would certainly have done it better. I wish I had had it to give to my son-in-law, whose mother died in January, unable to discuss the fact that she was dying. She had had MS and was very angry about the unfairness of it all. He and his sister tried to talk to her, to get her to make decisions, but she refused. "I don't want to talk about that", was all she would say.

This is a book that should be read by every hospice worker, paid or volunteer and should be offered to all clients. It's a how-to without giving instructions. Instead the authors teach us through stories. All of us who are currently healthy and think we are going to stay that way forever should read this book while we are still healthy. And finally anyone who works in the health field, doctors, nurses, practioners of various therapies---all should read this book. Once you pick it up, you won't be able to put it down. I couldn't.

Margo McAuliffe

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
ALL YOU WANT TO KNOW - FIRST BOOK I'VE SEEN THAT SAYS IT ALL -- AND SO WELL!
How prepare for death? What is dying? What is Hospice? This 185 page handbook provides a checklist of questions to ask, choices to make, documents to gather. The before, during, and after Hospice-care by two incredibly well-credentialed and compassionate professionals who have profound sensitivity and yet graphically lay out what steps need to be recognized and taken. Advanced directives, last moments, death itself, ethical wills. The banal but vital such as death certificate copies, funeral and/or memorial arrangements, insurance, benefits, credit cards, bank accounts, car registration, stocks and bonds, resources on all levels. Doctors, chaplains, nurses, clergy, counselors should read, have extra copies to distribute, keep handy on office shelves. Wide-ranging. Eloquent. Experienced. Inspired.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Profound and Practical - This very talented daughter-mother team has given us a comprehensive, practical, compassionate guidebook for dying well which has grown out of their combined personal and professional experiences. There is so much of deep meaning and value in this book that can profoundly impact how families handle death, all aspects of it. People want to do better with dying, and so often guidance and conversations are what make the difference. The book's balanced combination of storytelling and the nitty-gritty make it readable and usable. Several times in my life I would have been so comforted to have had this book in my hands if only to put labels on what I was thinking and to be reaffirmed in what made sense to me. I will recommend this book to my patients, use its insights in therapy, and keep a copy close by in my home.

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