Description
Caring for Life, Watching Over Death
Book Summary
This work offers a deep and human look at the care of terminal illness and death, both in the home and in healthcare settings. Through a diary-style narrative, the author explores the emotions, values, and practices that emerge at the end of life, revealing the contradictions and complexity of an extremely harsh reality. The reader becomes a witness to a process of cautious immersion that integrates personal experience with the institutional environment, providing keys to understanding and facing this crucial moment.
What is it about?
The book addresses the act of attending to terminal illness and death from a comprehensive perspective. It is not limited to a technical description of palliative care, but delves into the subjective experience of everyone involved: the patient, the family, healthcare professionals, and the researcher herself. Using a narrative style similar to a personal diary, the author shows how emotions and professional efficacy intertwine to articulate strategies and practices in the face of death. It explores the contradictions and ambivalences that arise in this context, from the intimacy of the home to the structure of the healthcare institution, offering an honest testimony that does not hide the harshness of the reality.
Main themes
- Palliative care and attention to terminal patients in domestic and hospital settings.
- Management of emotions and grief in healthcare professionals, family members, and patients.
- Relationship between the personal experience of death and the institutional healthcare framework.
- Coping strategies for advanced illness and the end of life.
- Values, practices, and contradictions in the dying process.
Who is it recommended for?
This book is aimed at healthcare professionals, especially those dedicated to oncology, palliative care, and nursing, as well as students of these disciplines. It is also of great interest to family members and caregivers of people with terminal illnesses, and to any reader interested in understanding the human, emotional, and social dimensions that surround death and grief.
What this book contributes
- A deep and realistic understanding of the emotional and practical complexity of caring for terminal patients.
- Tools to reflect on one's own contradictions and values regarding death.
- A perspective that integrates personal experience with the healthcare context, useful for professionals and family members.
- A direct testimony that allows the reader to accompany the process of immersion in the reality of advanced illness.
Technical Specifications
- Author: Soto Peña, Olga
- Publisher: Anthropos Editorial
- Language: Spanish
- Subject: Medicine: general issues, oncology, nursing care for terminal patients, coping with illness and specific disorders, coping with death and grief, self-help and personal development, mind, body and spirit, personal and social issues: death and bereavement
- Collection: DIVULGA
- Binding: Paperback
- Publication date: June 2016
- Number of pages: 144
- Weight: 190 g
Editorial Review
This is a necessary and courageous work that addresses a taboo subject with honesty and sensitivity. Its narrative approach, in the form of a diary, makes it easy for the reader to identify with the situations described and adds a human dimension often missing in technical manuals. It is a useful resource both for professionals seeking reflection on their practice and for anyone wishing to better understand the process of accompanying someone at the end of life.