In October 2014, my father was startled to receive a letter announcing the retirement, in a month's time, of our family physician. Both he and his doctor were in their late 60s by then, and their relationship went back about 30 years, to the early 1980s, after my father followed his father and paternal grandparents, all from the Midwest, to Southwest Florida. How they began seeing the doctor is beyond memory, but as my father's grandparents grew increasingly frail, his father frequently drove them to their doctor for checkups. At one of them, in the mid-'80s, the doctor suggested that it might be less strenuous for my great-grandparents if he met them in the parking lot. From then until they died, he came downstairs from his seventh-floor office with his black bag and climbed into the back seat of their yellow Oldsmobile 88 to give them their physicals.
More than a decade later, my grandfather, who was 78 by then and had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, developed pneumonia. When he was admitted to the county hospital, it was the same doctor — now my doctor, too — who came to his room to describe his options: go on a ventilator and go home, where he would most likely remain bedridden for the remainder of his life (probably months), or let the illness run its course and die within a few days. My grandfather asked if the latter would hurt much. The doctor said no, he could make him comfortable. All right, then, my grandfather replied.
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/magazine/health-issue-reinvention-of-primary-care-delivery.html?
