The Measure of Our Days: New Beginnings at Life's End

No small number of my loved ones have required the care of hematologists -- mother-in-law, nephew, two aunts, father, husband. I worked closely with a group of hematologists for several years and had a close friend in that branch of medicine. How, I always wondered, do they maintain the emotional and spiritual resources needed to continue in this challenging line of work? Dr. Jerome Groopman addresses that very question in the prologue to "The Measure of Our Days." He writes, "I identify several elements that give me hope and strength in the cold company of death. One is modern science and the potential for change it offers. Another is the wisdom and solace found in faith. And, perhaps most important, as the following stories reveal, I draw on the particular lessons -- of courage and endurance -- gained from my patients." There is Kirk, a venture capitalist with kidney cancer who learns too late what makes a life worthwhile. Dan, a research fellow with hemophilia, contracted AIDS from Factor VIII concentrates before routine screening of the blood supply. Cindy, in her mid-thirties, tried to get over a broken relationship by taking a "freedom week" at Club Med, and came home infected with HIV; she could not face life without the love of a child so she expressed her faith by adopting an orphan from overseas. Matt contracted AIDS from a transfusion for his acute leukemia in the year before screening of donated blood. Debbie tried to fight off her metastatic breast cancer with the principles of Tao rather than radiation and chemotherapy. Alex always insisted that he wanted to be assisted to die at the first sign of debility from his AIDS, but when the time came he clung to life and his young lover. Elizabeth used her social status to bring a power play into her relationships. And finally, Elliott, a lifelong friend of Dr. Groopman, learned to reassess the meaning of worldly achievement. These patients brought their personal strengths to the engagement, and in the retelling of their cases, Dr. Groopman shows his own spiritual depth and the faith that feeds it. "The Measure of Our Days" has good layman's explanations of the medical situations involved in the eight cases. If this type of language is within your context at all, then I recommend this book to you. Its message of hope goes beyond the dire medical scenarios and speaks volumes about the human spirit. Linda Bulger, 2008

I don't remember why or where I bought this book. I think it came highly recommended to me, as I have worked in HIV research and bioethics for the disabled for years, not as a job, but because it is what I care about. I think I accidently put this book up to sell, thinking it was another book on these same issues I had read years ago. When I got it out to send to another reader, I realized I hadn't read it. I can read quite fast when necessary and after the first few pages in this book, I realized I did not want to send it until I had read the whole thing. So I read it in one evening, and I am so glad I did. After just undergoing a horrendous couple of years with my own personal physician who threw medication at me in hopes something would help (and he just made things worse), I needed to be reminded there are outstanding and wonderful physicians out there still who see their work not as a way to make money but a way to make a living and provide for their families while still doing the most they can for humanity. I'd read Groopman's work before. He is a very prolific writer, as well as a physician and researcher into HIV and cancer. I don't know how he does it. The man must not sleep ever, and that also earns my admiration. His patients are not easy ones. They are the more difficult ones, and he see his job as being to give them the most time he can possibly squeeze out of their conditions. And that time he gives them, he makes them as comfortable as possible and as able to continue their life's work...this is what is meant by providing people with chronic illness and even illness whose end result is death with a quality of life equal to that, or better than that, than the life they had lived before. Why? Because they know their time is limited, and they seek to fill their remaining time with the most they can stuff into it. EAch of these individuals have different ideas of what constitutes a meaningful life, and each of them learn something from Groopman during their time under his care, and their stories not only taught Groopman something, but in this book they teach the reader something. I'd always been one of those people who didn't want to undergo chemotherapy for a cancer that would end in death anyhow. But now I understand from Groopman why you would prolong your time here, as long as it could be done in such a way as to achieve my goals and those for my family and friends, and give something back to others as I have always wanted to do (but often had to put to the side while I raised my family). This is one of the most compassionate books I have ever read. I hate to send it away but at the same time, I want others to read it. It teaches us to put into practice our religious beliefs rather than just spout them. It isn't enough to say 'this is what I believe.' Groopman teaches us that we can put our religious beliefs into daily practice and do the most good by doing that. I would definitely recommend this book as required reading for al

This book presents excellent accounts of a doctor who, above all else, is a good clinician. The accounts contain personal discussion, interesting patients, hard science, and lessons about both medicine and life. Admittedly, this last phrase, "lessons about both medicine and life" sounds cliche but as an obviously empathetic, observant and disciplined clinician, Groopman is well prepared to talk about the serious,universal issues that often arise in his specific line of work. Though he is a superspecialist, a nice aspect of this book is that Groopman is very objective about medicine overall. The technology he spends works on in lab is not at all treated as a panacea. Simultaneously, he does not shun or wholly embrace alternative medicine. It is simply another example of why he is a good clinician, qualifying the book further.An excellent, very fast read.

Jerome Groopman is familiar to many by now as a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, where at least one of the essays in the current book first appeared. Besides being a prolific writer, he also finds time in his day to be the Recanati Professor of Immunology at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a leading researcher on cancer and AIDS. One wonders how he manages all this, but he does, and in the course of his work he manages also to persuades some of his patients facing life-threatening illness to sit for their literary portraits. The 8 individuals represented in this book (two of whom were personal friends of Groopman before their illness struck) and Groopman, their caring scribe, are to be thanked for this finely crafted and enthralling account of persons facing death and their relationships with their doctor. Groopman explains the doctor's side of it:I have stood countless times...looking into the faces of a family and telling them their loved one has cancer. You steel yourself for the moment. ...You calm your face and maintain a firm voice, so that while you tell the family the truth, that the disease is aggressive and its treatment toxic, you simultaneously assert another truth, that there is a chance, a real chance, that the cancer can be defeated and the loved one saved. With this compassionate but determined show of force, you prevent the family and the patient from being overwhelmed by the ferocious surprise attack of the illness. Yes, you emphasize again that a cure is never assured. But once this is said, you move decidedly from despair to hope. You have to show that the battle already has been engaged, that you are the general of the army, that there is a strategy in place, that powerful weapons are at hand, and that no mercy will be shown the enemy. And as you mobilize your resources, of medical science and clinical experience, to fight to save this person, you look hard into the eyes of the family and search for the core of their strength. ...You need to understand this inner strength, where it comes from, how deep and resilient it is. Once you find it and comprehend it, you try to take it in your hand and fuse it with your own, because together this creates the unified forced required to sustain the patient through the hell that awaits and to carry him back to normal life.(90-91)The book can be viewed as a study of these fusions of force. The religious ruminations of doctor and patient and felicitous metaphors lifted from other areas of life - sports, venture capital, art, etc. weave together in the intense dialogue that evolves between the two allies in the struggle, a dialogue that may be crucial to the progress of treatment or, when need be, essential to a well-managed surrender. Will appeal to: any reader, but especially spiritual highly literate readers.

All great literature teaches that death is the mother of beauty, that human eloquence begins with the understanding of mortality. How better to know ourselves, the limits of our endurance, and the greatness of our spirit than at the brink? Jerome Groopman, a cancer and AIDS specialist, tends to dying or seriously ill people every day. His book (the title is from Psalm 39) takes readers into the lives and (sometimes) deaths of eight patients. With each of them, Groopman is both healer and confessor. But in the telling of their stories, he is more: he renders the poetry inherent in their lives and in so doing creates a psalm of the highest order--praising man not only for his strength, but for his ability to see his own weakness and bear it. The transcendent nature of our mortal experience is the ultimate subject of this book. No two stories are alike; each of the eight men or women (one is a child) carries the weight of illness and death differently, and we learn--through Groopman's telling--that despite the differences they are bound together in one essential way: they see the meaning of their lives with stark, beautiful clarity. This is a clarity most of us rarely experience, and one that Groopmen has been fortunate enough to see and capture for us in these gripping pages. That he is richer and greater for having allowed himself to be touched by these patients is surely evident, as is the rare gift he has given us in writing about them. "Who is wealthy?" quotes one patient from the Talmud. "He who rejoices in his portion," answers the Rabbi. Readers of this collection of startling, often horrendous tales of suffering and self-knowledge, will also learn about rejoicing.