Holding On

Ranjana Srivastava

Ranjana is a Melbourne oncologist. She has studied medicine in the U.S as a Fulbright scholar where she completed a Fellowship in medical ethics. She’s recently writen a book – Tell me the Truth - about working as an oncologist and the moral dilemmas she has come across.

Fred Pham

Fred is 47 and a father of five children. He has been told that he has incurable cancer but is still fighting. He is currently on “fourth-line chemo”, which doctors tell him has a slim chance of working. Determined to fight, he has gone on clinical drug trials and travelled to Vietnam to find herbal medicines that might help him. He says that if it means he is able to spend more time with his kids, he thinks it is worth a try, even if there are side effects. Fred is currently fundraising for cancer research.

Jeff Szer

Jeff is the head haematologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and director of the hospital’s bone marrow transplant program, a risky procedure for people with certain blood cancers. He says being optimistic in his field is important. Jeff is also on the ethics committee at his hospital which approves the trial of new cancer drugs.

Don Mudge

Don is 62 and was diagnosed with incurable colon cancer in May 2009. At this time he was told he had 6 to 9 months to live. His first bout of cancer was in 2004 with bowel cancer. During that time he stopped chemotherapy because he didn’t think the side effects were worth it. He survived, and thought he had beaten cancer. He definitely doesn’t want to be on life support and is wary about the cost of his treatment to the public health system.

Peter Saul

Peter is a senior intensive care specialist at John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle. He has spent much of his career looking at the ethical questions raised in his profession. The worrying trend of more people dying in acute care, an often traumatic and unplanned experience, is the symptom of dying becoming over-medicalised.

Nadine, John and Archie Castellano

Nadine and John are parents to 7-month old Archie who has been diagnosed with a rare terminal illness. They recently took their son home after a week at Bear Cottage, a children’s hospice and respite centre. After spending so much of his short life in hospitals and being intubated in ICU, Archie’s parents feel the best thing now for their son is to keep him comfortable without invasive therapy.

Bill Silvester

Bill Silvester is an intensive care specialist at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne. He also runs the “Respecting Patient Choices” program, which encourages people, healthy and unwell, to pre-plan what medical treatment they'd want at the end of life. He says that across Australia there are people receiving treatments they would have not wanted if they had been asked.