Dear Life

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Rachel specialises in palliative care and this book maps her journey into that particular specialism. Her extraordinary powers of empathy are part of what makes her the sort of doctor we would all want on hand for anyone we love, but also give her the ability to write sensitively and beautifully about painful subjects. Here Rachel tells her story - of how death was so conspicuously absent during her medical training, which was focused entirely on learning to save lives and was entirely wanting when it came to helping patients and their families to face death. She came to specialise in palliative medicine because it is the one speciality in which what matters is quality, not quantity of life. Dear Life is about how Rachel came to understand - as a child, as a doctor, as a human being - how best to help patients in the final stages of life, and what that might mean in practice. In the same year she started to work in a hospice, her own beloved father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Always close to her father, it was largely his inspiration that had led her from journalism into re-training as a doctor, and it was stories he had told her as a child that were to prove formative when it came to be deciding what sort of medicine she would practice. But for all her professional exposure to dying, she remained a grieving daughter