Helping Patients Face Death, She Fought to Live

It's hard not to admire the sheer tenacity of Dr. Pardi raging, raging against the dying of the light. The drama to life holds such mysteries: a palliative specialist who rejects the hospice basic premises and goes out fighting in pain. It's great that Dr. Pardi had the resources to fight to the bitter end -- which in some ways reads like yet another indulgence of a wealthy person inured to the suffering world around her. What makes one person scrap against all odds against inevitable death and another accept the fatal fate with peace and resignation? Dr. Pardi was lucky to have the resources to indulge every conceivable heroic treatment -- and skilled physicians and loved ones who enabled her Quixotic quest. It's especially ironic that she opted for a path quite different from that she suggested to many of her own patients -- and a course not even available to those with fewer resource$. Of course we all die. Unusual stories of courage (or is it stubbornness?) provide another model of the spectrum between hope/defiance and resignation/acceptance. I'm not sure there is really anything to be learned from Dr. Pardi's story except that here was a human being who chose to fight against one of the pillars of what makes us mortal: mortality. We can only pray she's found a happy reception in the world hereafter she was so intent on avoiding.

This is not the story I read.

She was a physician who at great cost delayed the inevitable end in order to practice her profession. When she could no longer hope to do that she accepted palliative care and did not delay. she was personally heroic.

See if you can find that story in the report.