Sheridan
speaker
27 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2023
last heard May 2024
Sheridan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, so I did not get a public health degree from the University of Minnesota for my undergrad, but it was my minor. And I was a pre-med, and I just had always thought I was going to go medical school, pharmaceuticals maybe. And as we learned how to solve individual problems, I realized there were a lot more systemic problems and that more problems could be fixed upstream.
And that is really what ignited my passion for public health. I'd already dabbled a little bit in high school. I used to do anti-tobacco smoking campaigns in high school, which really tells you I was probably set up for this since the beginning. But I really felt like I found my people when I was having these like bigger level systemic changes, creating
You know, the solutions that actually solve really big problems. That's what really lit my soul on fire. So I was wondering what brought you and like lit your soul on fire in regards to public health.
I don't know.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, I wanted to circle back to what Clarence was saying earlier about how a lot of people kind of, think that they're immortal and don't have plans necessarily for dying. But it sounds like Clarence does have some sort of a plan. And I think it's important for everybody, even I'm only 24.
But I have a plan for when I die, because like we've been talking about, it's one of the only certainties in life. And not having a plan only further burdens the people that you leave behind. So just having a plan, like what you want, like your final arrangements is a really important thing.
having a will, um, a living trust, having beneficiaries, having a plan, even though it's not easy to think about is so important for both making sure your wishes are granted, but easing the pain on the people that are left with this burden.
Well, I was just going to say, Clarence, you're completely right. The medicalization of death and how much farther we've gone in just advancements in medicine, even in the last 100 years, people are dying differently. People used to die a lot younger of illnesses that I think it was the average age of workers was like 24 was when they would die. Obviously, it's much, much later on now.
So as that shifted, and people realize that medicine is keeping us alive longer, it's a lot easier to put it put the thought of death out of our minds and somewhere in the abstract future, not as it being a finite point in all of our lives. And also there's taboos on conversations about death. We don't use like we've been talking about terms like, oh, they died.
We say, oh, they passed on or they passed away. We avoid we use euphemisms and we avoid the blunt truth of it, which is really doing us a disservice. because people aren't being realistic.
And then we also, like you said, segregate the dying from the rest of society in homes, like hospice care or nursing homes, even though a majority of people say they want to die in their own house with their loved ones around. So there's a disconnect between what people actually want when they die and what our society is doing.
And I think that that's one of the big reasons people are afraid of death. It's because people aren't dying how they actually want to die. We're not talking about it and we're pushing people away. It's just not a good combination right now.
Yeah, yeah.
Just a note on donation and having plans for that, if that is something you choose or you are interested in. I just went through this process as I lost my aunt this summer to a fairly traumatic situation. She had a thyroid issue and she was in the hospital, in the ICU. She was doing very well after her surgery and then she was less monitored. She ended up aspirating and then having a heart attack.
They revived her, but she had no brain activity. So while she was technically alive, she was deemed brain dead or in a permanent vegetative state. These situations are something that most people never anticipate being in in their life. And I found myself in this situation and We were presented with whether or not we wanted to donate her organs because she still had a perfectly fine set of organs.
You can even donate your skin or your retinas can go to several people. So you can give with the gift of your organs, you can give the gift of eyesight. of skin to children who have issues with their skin. Like there are so many different ways that you can donate.
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