You're listening to Well Now Slate's podcast on health and wellness.

I'm Kavita Patel.

And I'm Maya Feller.

Each week, we've explored wellness from different perspectives.

We have yet to really talk about what it means to live a full life while grappling with the very

real possibility of death. Most of us hope for a full, long life with quote unquote good health.

It's true, Maya, very rarely do I start a conversation with anybody, a family member or a patient

or even just a casual acquaintance with, you know, hey, don't you want to have

a shorter life or don't you want to have a serious or potentially fatal diagnosis? But unfortunately,

as you know, Maya, that happens. And a serious diagnosis or something such as cancer completely

puts fear into people's hearts because everything

changes the way we see our loved ones, even the way we see ourselves.

So before we speak with our guest, Maya, can you talk about how you've witnessed a life-changing

diagnosis play out in your professional environment or your personal environment.

Yeah, Kavita. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about how it's played out in work.

And when I'm thinking about the tools that I develop to help patients move through these challenges,

what I can really say is that it's more around supporting them in the moment while

being real and honest about what the future holds. Nutrition, if we're thinking about kind of

end of life, it shifts. Nutrition in hospice is very different than nutrition that is supporting

longevity. And when I was working in a hospital at Sloan Kettering and we had patients who were

on hospice and they were getting end of life care, we were really focused on providing comforting foods, things that they could

tolerate, and just being there and being supportive, which is really different than the

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