While I was in my hospital’s Coronary Care Unit recuperating from a heart attack, my longtime family physician knew nothing about what had just happened to her patient of over 32 years. At some point, a hospital report signed by the cardiologist in charge of my care was sent off to her (probably by fax – and by the way, can you name any other profession that still uses the fax machine as a mode of such sensitive, important and personal communication?) Continue reading “Is your doctor talking to your other doctors?”
Category: Heart Sisters
“I’m the least depressed person on earth, except when I’m depressed”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
When I learned that Dr. Sherwin Nuland was going to be doing a guest lecture at the University of Victoria here back in 2012, I was among the first in town to book tickets. I loved his book called How We Die (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) ever since I’d featured his chapter on death and heart disease three years earlier here.
His sold-out UVic audience was enthralled by his engaging manner and compelling excerpts read from his newest book called The Art of Aging: A Doctor’s Prescription for Well-Being.
But I was even more intrigued by this famous surgeon/Yale University professor’s personal stories of his own experience living with debilitating depression – a depression so crippling, so impossible to shift, that in his 40s, his doctors even considered doing a pre-frontal lobotomy. Continue reading ““I’m the least depressed person on earth, except when I’m depressed””
Can it be two years since my mother’s death?
Two years ago today, I wrote this essay on the morning my mother died:
Rest in peace, Mom.
Joan Zaruk ♥ May 7, 1928 – February 21, 2012
At 5 a.m. this morning, after hearing the news on the phone, I reread the chapter called When Your Mother Dies, in Rona Maynard’s wonderful book, My Mother’s Daughter:
“Baby showers herald the transition to motherhood. Roses, greeting cards and invitations to lunch celebrate mothers every May. Yet, despite our culture’s motherhood mystique, no rituals mark the psychological journey we daughters begin when our mothers die. Continue reading “Can it be two years since my mother’s death?”
A year in review: Top 10 Heart Sisters posts from 2013
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
It’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 what I like to describe as this “cardiac rehab for my brain” – and why over 1 million visitors from 190 countries have viewed this site since I launched it in 2009! Continue reading “A year in review: Top 10 Heart Sisters posts from 2013”
Heart Sisters 