Carolina Tylawsky
Summer Reading Assignment #2
Yost
What Broke My Father's Heart by Katy Butler
Summary: This essay is a brutal look at the consequences of the advances of modern medicine. The bitter side of medical intervention and its effects on Butler's parents. Her father's life is extended far past it's quality of life and strains his wife so intensely she writes in her journal "Enough of all this overkill! Its killing me! Talk about quality of life-what about mine?". The author supports her argument that modern medicine has disrupted with natural selection, longevity, and quality of life by using multiple facts from countless credible sources. Eventually, health problems rob her parents from life and although her mother outlives her father, she too suffers heart conditions at the end of her life. Rather than endure surgeries that would've rendered her dependent on others as her husband's surgeries did, Butler's mother chooses to suffer silently. She survives two heart attacks after refusing open heart surgery and while on bed rest after the second, she tells her nurses she will not eat or drink and to let her die. She dies an hour later.
Credibility: Butler attended Sarah Lawrence College and holds a B.A. and an honorary M.A. from Wesleyan University. As a cityside reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, she helped cover the right-to-die movement, and health care economics. Butler also wrote the book Knocking on Heaven's Door an in depth look at her parents' deaths and the devestation of modern medicine takes on humane death.
Context: The story is written like a memoir sprinkled with opinion and facts.
Purpose: To bring light to the negative effects that extending lives through medical advancement diminishes quality of life and does not allow for a humane or timely death.
Audience: The audience of this essay seemed to me to be young adult and above. There were a lot of facts and statistics that would have read as disinteresting and too informational for a child.
Rhetorical Devices: Nostalgia is used to describe what life was like before her father required so much care taking. It is used to depict the relationship shared by her parents and the way each of them were before the prolonging of Butler's father's life.
Opinion: I choose to read this essay because i generally enjoy sad memoirs and tragedies. However, I found this essay much more informative than I had expected. I had some background knowledge of the con argument to sustaining life in elderly people beyond natural timed death. This was very enlightening, I learned much more than I had known before and also enjoyed Butler's style of writing.
Katy Butler Courtesy of BookPassages.com http://www.bookpassage.com/files/bookpassage/butlerKaty.jpg?1373413579
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