Antje May writes from the experience of her daughter Mascha, who suffered severe traumatic brain injury as a pedestrian at age seventeen and fell into a so-called vegetative state. From a medical perspective there was no hopeful prognosis, but intensive treatments continued for five months: operations, therapies, resuscitation and life-sustaining measures.
May describes the time as torture. Palliative medicine was not discussed and withholding life-sustaining treatment was not permitted. Yet Mascha's previously expressed will was clear: she would never have wanted to live in a vegetative state, ventilated and fed through a tube.
After long suffering, the family sought a hospice placement. In the hospice May experienced what can be done at the end of life to relieve suffering. Care aimed at allowing the dying process and addressing problems therapeutically led to a more relaxed condition. May writes that the hospice gave her daughter her dignity back.
Her daughter's accident and death changed her life. One year later she trained as a Palliative Care specialist. From her experience, people want a dignified death; they do not want to be kept alive artificially and without self-determination in the last phase of life.
May calls for palliative care concepts in all areas where people are accompanied until the end of life, and for better training in all professions that encounter death. She encourages readers to talk with family and friends about what they would want in existential situations and to write those wishes in advance directives. Such conversations can relieve loved ones of an unbearable burden of responsibility.
There are situations, she concludes, in which no decision is good - but there can still be decisions that preserve human dignity.
