My husband has been diagnosed with heart failure (BNP over 2,000) and told he has a year to two years at most to live. I know there are stages a person goes through after being told that there is basically nothing more that can be done. I've searched and can't find what I am looking for.
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The five questions he thinks doctors should discuss with terminal patients are worth consideration. Later in interviews he suggests we all ask these questions and ask more than once because we change our minds as circumstances change.
My mom had CHF the last few years of her life. Reading the experiences of others on this forum has helped me process what happened to her. She had no issues except CHF and the HBP she would not acknowledge.
The CHF treatment was so hard on her and made harder by her self imposed restrictions that she spent the last several years waiting for death. When one is in their 90s I suppose regardless of health issues, death beckons. I loved Gawande’s take on so many things. Maybe because he validated a lot of what I intuitively believed. I found it uplifting.
Both the books referenced are also excellent.
Reading “How We Die” helped me get my FIL to a trauma hospital and was the catalyst for extending his life another 10 years.
Barb’s suggestion of “Five Stages of Grief” is of course a classic.
“On Death and Dying” by “Kubler-Ross” (which I believe she wrote before the “Five Stages”) I read when I was very young and it was helpful.
Another take on the ideas of the steps we go through in accepting any loss is Peter McWilliams, “How To Survive the Loss of a Love”.
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