A tonic for tumultuous times: an interview with “Reasons To Be Cheerful”

Thank you Michaela for introducing me to RTBC, for including me in your interview, and for helping to speed up the “slow, powerful work” of bridging that gap in women’s health care. While it can feel  like progress seems glacially slow, it helps to remember that sometimes the penny drops, the narrative is heard just in time, women speak up for themselves, and the universe unfolds as it should.

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I shared one example of this during my interview for RFBC  (repeated in the article).  About halfway through one of my Saturday morning Cardiac Café  brunch presentations at the University of Victoria, I noticed from the corner of my eye a woman leaving the auditorium via the back door. She returned to her seat a minute later, but then left again. I thought little of this minor distraction at the time – but much later I learned that this woman had been trying to ignore her serious cardiac symptoms all morning – the same ones I was describing onstage at that very moment. Who knows if she would have survived had she not been sitting there in my audience that day listening to that list of women’s heart symptoms? Her second exit had been to call 911!  And while paramedics out in the hall were loading her into an ambulance, the rest of us missed all the excitement going on just beyond that door!   Sometimes, we get to be in the right place at the right time – and just in time to save a life.

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You can learn more from David Byrne himself in this short video. about Reasons For Being Cheerful.  David’s also the Founder of the Arbutus Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to re-imagining the world through projects that inspire and educate. Reasons To Be Cheerful is the Arbutus Foundation’s first project.