When I Die

An end-of-life doctor faces his own end-of-life from a glioblastoma.

When I Die.

Peter Rasmussen was always able to identify with his patients, particularly in their final moments. But he saw himself especially in a small, businesslike woman with leukemia who came to him in the spring of 2007, not long before he retired. Alice was in her late fifties and lived in a sparsely furnished farmhouse outside Salem, Oregon, where Rasmussen practiced medical oncology. Like him, she was stubborn and practical and independent. She was not the sort of patient who denied what was happening to her or who scrambled after any possibility of a cure, no matter what the cost. As Rasmussen saw it, “She had long ago thought about what was important and valuable to her, and she applied that to the fact that she now had acute leukemia.”

This is an excellent article in the January 2016 Harper's Magazine.  It was sent to us by Kathy McKnight.

Dr. Rasmussen and family members