by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
And now for something completely different . . . My blogging sisters Marie Ennis-O’Connor (Ireland) and Nancy Stordahl (Wisconsin, USA) inspired me recently to follow their blogging challenge called “15 Random Facts About Me”. Because I’d really enjoyed learning random gems about both Marie and Nancy (after admiring their work for years), I was happy to take up their fun challenge: Continue reading “A blogging challenge: 15 random facts about me”
Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
One beautiful afternoon, I was walking my daughter home from her downtown office at the end of her workday. I love these mother-daughter walks of ours. We used to do them quite often (before Larissa recently delivered my darling grandbaby Everly Rose and started her extended maternity leave).
She’d phone me just as she was about to leave work, and we’d each start walking from opposite ends of Rockland Avenue (a long leafy ramble that starts downtown near her office and finishes up near our respective homes in Oak Bay Village). We’d meet up about halfway to walk the rest of the way home together. In this fashion, we each got an hour’s brisk walk into our day, but best of all, we got to chat all the way home.
But this one afternoon, while we were walking along Rockland, I felt the familiar yet ominous crush of chest pain as we walked, that frightening kind of angina that seems to get worse with every step. After trying my best to ignore these symptoms at first, I finally had to stop her while she was in mid-sentence, fishing in my bag for nitro spray as I lurched towards a nearby stone bench to sit down. Continue reading “Do you want the truth, or do you want “Fine, thank you”?”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
My Dad died of cancer at age 62, my mother decades later from a stroke following years of increasing dementia. So I have some experience being the adult daughter of a parent diagnosed with a life-altering medical condition. And I’ve also seen the faces of my own grown children right after they flew home to be with me right after my heart attack. Honestly, I don’t know which felt worse.
The majority of heart patients in North America have adult children. And when heart disease strikes, it can affect not only the patient, but the immediate family of that patient. If one of your parents has a cardiac event, as psychologist Dr. Wayne Sotile warns, you might have the makings of what he calls “the best hidden victims of heart illness: the patient’s adult children”. Continue reading “When you’re the adult child of a heart patient”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
We all know about prescribing. It’s what our docs do when they pull out the prescription pad so we can start or keep taking a specific drug for a specific medical reason.
But what about deprescribing?
Basically, deprescribing happens when a health care professional decides to taper or stop recommending one or more prescription drugs for any given patient. The practice is aimed at minimizing what’s known as polypharmacy (that’s when patients are taking multiple medications at the same time) while at the same time improving patient outcomes.
What’s the problem with polypharmacy? Plenty, as it turns out.
Continue reading “Deprescribing: fewer drugs, better health outcomes?”
Heart Sisters 