I want to ____ until I die: Disrupting Death with Kathy Kastner

On this episode of Disrupting Death, Kathy and Keri speak with entrepreneur, author, and volunteer witness for MAiD Kathy Kastner. With humour and relatability, Kathy discusses the importance of developing more accessible and thoughtful language in healthcare, and the importance of individuals identifying what truly matters to them at the end of their lives.

PS. In this episode, Keri mentions her puppet “Phoebe the Sloth." Phoebe the Sloth is Keri’s educational puppet. Together, Keri and Phoebe help kids talk about living and life, and dying and death.

Kathy Kastner became an entrepreneur in the health space when pregnant with her first daughter. Applying skills developed as a television producer and reporter, she co-founded The Health Television System, to create hospital-based patient education TV networks: The Parent Channel and Healthtv, in teaching hospitals across North America. A Twitter chat sparked an interest in palliative, hospice care and medical assistance in dying, leading to creating BestEndings.com, to share as she learned from a patient’s point of view. To dig deeper into MAID, Kathy is a volunteer witness for the necessary paperwork required to begin the MAID approval process.

Kathy is an author: 'Death Kills’; her original research, The Whiteboard Experiment, has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Her TEDxTalk: Exit Laughing; Keynote presentation at Stanford University: Sweat the Small Stuff. YouTube series, ’10-second MedSchool’, on medication administration confusion. She also facilitates workshops on Dying and Death with students in the University of Toronto’s Center for Advancing Collaborative Health and Education. Her personal website KathyKastner.com

You can find Kathy on Twitter @kathykastner Instagram: @mybestendings and Youtube: KathyKastnerBestEndings

TEDxTalks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbh694DDufk

You can buy Kathy’s book, Death Kills, here: https://www.amazon.ca/Death-things-learned-internet-illustrated-ebook/dp/B01LXKFCBV