Hope for the Best, Plan for the Rest

Dr. Sammy Winemaker and Dr. Hsien Seow

Being diagnosed with a life-changing illness can be completely overwhelming. In Hope for the Best, Plan for the Rest, Drs. Sammy Winemaker and Hsien Seow offer a valuable guide to help patients and families deal with their new reality. Combining their decades of palliative care research and experience caring for seriously ill patients and harnessing the advice of thousands of patients, they offer 7 keys for navigating a life-changing diagnosis. With real-life stories, tips, and exercises, these compassionate experts empower patients with practical tools to help them successfully navigate the health care system with knowledge and confidence.

The 7 Keys:

1. Walk Two Roads. Hope for the best, and plan for the rest. Toggle between being realistic and being hopeful.
2. Zoom Out. Understand the big picture of your illness and what might lie ahead.
3. Know Your Style. Review your past patterns for insights into how you will journey through your illness. Identify your coping strategies and your ways of processing information.
4. Customize Your Order. Communicate your wishes, values, and beliefs to help tailor your care plan to your preferences.
5. Anticipate Ripple Effects. Recognize that those caring for you will also need to be supported.
6. Connect the Dots. Play a central role in coordinating your care (or identify someone who can).
7. Invite Yourself. Speak up. Initiate conversations about what to expect and advocate for yourself.

These 7 keys are not steps or stages to be followed in a particular order, but are meant to be blended together and used as needed. After devoting one chapter to each of the keys, the writers wrap up with a chapter entitled Putting It All Together and then two final chapters that deal in more detail with the late and end stages of disease and the actual process of dying. They caution their readers to read those two chapters only if they feel comfortable doing so. The book would be a complete and helpful tool without them, but personally I found both chapters informative and reassuring.

This book, published in 2023, wasn’t available ten years earlier when I received my first cancer diagnosis. Looking back, I think that over time I implemented most of the keys either intuitively or through bits and pieces of advice that I received along the way, but how much better it would have been to have a book like this one to guide my way. It’s a book about hope (my one word for 2024) in the face of uncertainty. It’s about living well, being fully informed, and getting the best care available. It’s about being a whole person and not just a patient. It’s a call for patient-led, patient-centred health care.