What Broke My Father's Heart

The essay What Broke My Father’s Heart, by Katy Butler, explored her experiences with today’s medical system due to her father’s illness. Butler includes how her father’s dementia came to be, and describes his slow degeneration into his vegetated state. She describes her family’s relationship to the medical system as a result of his illness. The essay includes how Butler and her mother were not well informed in their choice to insert a pacemaker into her father. Butler highlights their regrets in making an uninformed medical decision; and, in the end she includes what her mother did differently when her health began to decline.

What Broke My Father’s Heart is written for any adult who wishes to be informed about Katy Butler’s story. However, her purpose in telling her story also includes informing people of the flaws in the American healthcare system. Although the essay is told through a personal standpoint, Butler includes many facts from medical studies; therefore, making her essay a much more credible source rather than a mere personal account. 

The facts that were incorporated into Butler’s writing are rhetorical devices that played a significant part in achieving her purpose. Through logos, she is able to convey to the reader that doctors can’t always have a patient’s best interest at heart because, “20 to 30 percent of Medicare’s $510 billion budget goes for unnecessary tests and treatment,” (Butler 16). Butler brings to attention that, “only 5 percent of the positive [pacemaker] recommendations were supported by research,” (Butler 19). And, with this information, the reader begins to doubt the system.

Appealing to the reader with pathos, Butler highlights the pain her mother went through during the duration of her father’s last years of life. She describes the struggles mother endured to take care of her father constantly, and for her to see the love of her life slowly fading away. Butler even includes quotes from her mother’s diary to prompt the reader to sympathize. The use of logos and pathos helps Katy Butler to highlight the flaws in the American healthcare system using her personal experiences.

(source: http://www.joinerandjoiner.com/medicare/)