The codes of ethics of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and the National Association of Social Workers support ethical standards of client self-determination and confidentiality. Lack of societal consensus on the parameters of a terminally ill person's right to die continues to confound at times the health care field, including hospice programs. This article explores an actual case where a hospice social worker faced an ethical dilemma related to the sanctity of life versus patient autonomy. While a more seasoned social worker might have chosen a different alternative to the dilemma, this case illustrates the importance of creating an interdisciplinary rather than multidisciplinary hospice team and the need for ongoing dialogue on how to support patient choice.

This manuscript was written for and delivered as the keynote address at the Southern California Cancer Pain Initiative's 2002 Annual Awards Dinner. The author thought the journal's readership might experience the content as more immediate if it remained in its original narrative form.

The surgeon has offered me a chair, tightly fitted in the corner of her office. She proceeds with what seems like a foreign language, and relays the news. Absorbing the minimum, I learn that I have breast cancer.

Clinical Update: Literature Abstracts

Literature abstracts.

Dr. Alan Morgenstern joined the psychiatry faculty at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in 1965. He also served as chairman of psychiatry at Good Samaritan Hospital and Medical Center in Portland, Oregon. His many accomplishments include his part in a World Health Organization Travel-Study Fellowship. He served as a senior examiner for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and he published a critique of this process, which resulted in a humanization of the experience for examinees. While teaching at OHSU he had a tremendous impact on generations of students who were impressed by his humane approach to medicine. He received the OHSU Meritorious Achievement Award for Teaching. He also served as a captain in the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. His close friend, Harold Boverman, M.D., wrote, “He loved his family, his work, his patients, his friends, and his music; his license plate read ‘etude.’”

Dr. Morgenstern contacted us regarding his hope that we would facilitate publishing this account of his experience as a hospice patient. This represents an edited version of his manuscript. L.G. and H.B.

Clinical Update: Literature Abstracts

Oncology Nursing Society

From earliest times, sages have advised us to become comfortable with transience, more than that, to be at peace with our approaching death and to keep it in constant view. Whatever the benefits of such a perspective, they must surely be harvested in abundance by those working in Palliative Care! An ongoing personal cost/benefit analysis of our daily confrontation with death is for many a legacy of the trade. “Why” questions are our persistent companions. They have colored my recent days as I holiday with my family in a cottage on Lac Massawippi in Quebec.

Calendar of events.

Calendar of Events

“Cultured Mourning” and “Solstice of My Life”

On page 93, paragraph 2, sentence 2 should have read:“in a lifelong friendship of eighteen months, he had been my colleague, my mentor, my fellow-performer, my friend”. We inadvertently eliminated the phrase “of eighteen months” which did not accurately reflect Dr. Mount's intention of communicating the intense experience of getting to know Philip Simmons over a relatively short period of time, yet still have the sense of being a lifelong friend.

Abstract categories: New Measures and Symptom Control