Category: Heart Sisters

Patient bloggers at healthcare conferences: ‘real’ journalists?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 9 Comments
Like some of my most deliciously niggling inspirations these days, this one started on Twitter. Arthritis patient advocate, speaker and a Stanford University Medicine X e-Patient Scholar Britt Johnson tweeted this:
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To which patient advocate, speaker (and also a Stanford University Medicine X e-Patient Scholar Carly Medosch who blogs at Chronic Carly) responded:
 
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It was Carly’s observation that caused one of my eyebrows to flick skyward, unbidden.

Continue reading “Patient bloggers at healthcare conferences: ‘real’ journalists?” →

“It’s no hobby. It is a vital service.”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 3 Comments

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by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

Hobby: häbē/ noun. an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure. “Her hobbies are reading, knitting and gardening”

I’m guessing that those of us who have ‘graduated’ from the WomenHeart Science and Leadership Symposium For Women With Heart Disease (a training program held each fall at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota) rarely consider our volunteer contributions as a “hobby” in the birdwatching/jewelry-making/focaccia-baking sense of that word.

We already know that our Mayo training gives us ‘street cred’.  The days we spent experiencing world-class “cardiology bootcamp” in Rochester opened doors that allow us to share what we’ve learned as community educators, media spokespersons or heart patient support group leaders. So far, over 600 WomenHeart ‘champions’ in the U.S. (and two of us here in Canada) have been trained to be “the boots on the ground” in the fight against women’s heart disease – our #1 killer. According to WomenHeart, 45% of the women who graduate from this annual training at Mayo have been credited with saving someone’s life.

But sometimes, we are smacked upside the head by those who simply have no clue about the difference between a volunteer and a hobbyist. Take, for example, this story from my heart sister, Leslea Steffel-Dennis.  Continue reading ““It’s no hobby. It is a vital service.”” →

A year in review: Top 10 Heart Sisters posts in 2014

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 10 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

2014It’s that time again, when navel-gazing pundits everywhere compile their Best Of or Top 10 lists of movies, political stories, books or bloopers for the year that’s just about to slip away. Same here at Heart Sisters.  So let’s take a nostalgic look backwards today at 2014, at what I like to describe as “cardiac rehab for my brain”. This blog was viewed about 900,000 times in 2014. My WordPress helper monkeys behind the scenes tell me that if this were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 39 days for that many people to see it!  Grand total of Heart Sisters views is over 2 million from readers in 190 countries since I launched this site back in 2009.   Continue reading “A year in review: Top 10 Heart Sisters posts in 2014” →

A motherless Mother’s Day

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 8 Comments

Based on a post originally published here on May 13, 2012

This month marks both the occasion of my mother’s birthday (on May 7th, coincidentally the birthday of her first great-grandchild, Everly Rose, born in 2015) and, of course, Mother’s Day – yet another Mother’s Day when I didn’t send my Mom a card and flowers. That’s because she died on February 21st, 2012. Last month, she missed the birthdays of her first child (me) and her first grandchild (my own son, Ben) – but since the cruel diagnosis of vascular dementia invaded her brain cells some time ago, she’d long been unable to keep track of things like family birthdays anymore.

As Christopher Buckley wrote in his memoir, Losing Mum and Pup, when the last of your parents dies, you are an orphan:

“But you also lose the true keeper of your memories, your triumphs, your losses. Your mother is a scrapbook for all your enthusiasms. She is the one who validates and the one who shames, and when she’s gone, you are alone in a terrible way.” Continue reading “A motherless Mother’s Day” →