王盈方醫師瘋狂之旅 Dr Yvonne Wang's Blabberings

A grim topic, isn’t it? Today we learnt about palliative care. The lecturer showed us a video of man in his 60s called Herbie. This gentleman kindly allowed his dying process to be filmed so we know how the dying process is like in real life.

We have often seen people “dying” in movies and other TV programs: there’s dying person saying his/her last words and then the sudden dropping of the hand, or the whole body going limp. However, these are not very realistic views of the dying process and through this video, the lecturer demonstrated to us that the real dying process could take pretty long. Another thing to note is that the brain activity of a dying person increases just before his/her death, so one should not say anything which he/she does not want a dying person to hear in front of the dying person.

First, we see Herbie newly diagnosed with a terminal gastrointestinal cancer. He seemed very alert and was talking energetically to the camera. It was approaching winter and the family just had a new puppy. As time progressed, we see Herbie’s belly getting bigger from ascites, and his face becoming more and more sunken. Then he started needing his wife’s help to get up from the chair. At one stage he got depressed (which is not considered normal in his case) and became himself again when they gave him the antidepressants. Eventually, winter passed and the puppy became a grown dog. Herbie continued to smoke even in the last few days of his life. On the day before his death he laid on a bed in the living room, barely having energy to open his eyes or smile, and the wife had to wipe off some of his saliva. On the last day of his life, his breathing sounded very gurgly – this happens when one is dying as one does not even have the energy to swallow his or her saliva. His wife remained on his side, held him, and spoke very comforting words to him. The gurgly sound became intermittent… and finally stopped.