How a Dying Grandmother Shaped Japan’s End-of-Life Debate
This article is for subscribers only.
My grandmother, Hisako Miyake, was one of 260,000 bedbound and elderly patients in Japan kept alive, often for years, with a surgically inserted feeding tube.
Obaachan, as I called her in Japanese, suffered from advanced dementia. She had been given liquid nutrients through a tube implanted in her stomach back in February 2013.