Washoe County Library System

"An ICU and Palliative Care specialist featured in the Netflix documentary Extremis offers a framework for a better way to exit life that will change our medical culture at the deepest level In medical school, no one teaches you how to let a patient die. Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in critical care--to become an ICU physician--and imagined herself swooping in to rescue patients from the...

Follows a singer in New York City after she receives a bleak medical diagnosis and struggles to process the news while preparing for a local performance and encountering family, friends, and colleagues.

In an imposing house in the Colorado Rockies, Jericho Ainsley, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and a Wall Street titan, lies dying. He summons to his bedside Beck DeForde, the younger woman for whom he threw away his career years ago, miring them both in scandal. Beck believes she is visiting to say farewell. Instead, she is drawn into a battle over an explosive secret that foreign governments and powerful corporations alike want to...

Live every moment, love every minute. A girl dying of leukemia compiles a list of things she'd like to do before passing away. On the top of her list is the desire to lose her virginity.

"Jennifer Cole has just been told that she has a terminal blood disorder and has just three months to live--ninety days to say goodbye to friends and family, and to put her affairs in order. Ninety days to come to terms with a diagnosis that is unfair, unexpected, and completely unpronounceable. Focusing on the positives (she won't have to go on in a world without Bowie or Maya Angelou; she won't get Alzheimer's or Parkinson's like her parents, or...

"Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian...

A thirty-something tax auditor who doesn't overlook a thing, Lucy Shoreman had been blind to her husband's philandering. Now, as he lies on his deathbed, she decides she's not going through it alone. She opens Artie's little black book and begins calling his sweethearts. And to her great surprise, one by one, they show up: the one who hates him, the one who owes her life to him, the one he turned into a lesbian, and the one he taught to dance. And...

The authors draw from their work as hospice nurses to share the ways in which the dying communicate their needs, and offer advice to friends and family members on how to listen for, and respond to these signals.

"When her daughter desperately needed a lung transplant to survive, Janet Murnaghan rallied against the outdated restrictions in healthcare that would limit her daughter's options. Sarah had been dying of cystic fibrosis since the day she was born. The disease quickly ravaged her lungs and little body bit-by-bit. Fragile and frail, she had only weeks to live, when her mom realized the reality of Sarah's situation: transplant laws, restricting access...