Category: Living with heart disease

posts here focus on the “new normal” you’ll discover once you get home from hospital and the reality starts to sink in

News flash: care improves when doctors consider the whole person

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 11 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

When I worked in hospice palliative care, I remember being gobsmacked one day while reading in a medical journal about Dr. Harvey Chochinov’s research on Dignity Therapy out of the Manitoba Palliative Care Research Unit.(1) His studies determined that – wait for it! – patients feel better when their doctors listen to them. This of course sounds like a no-brainer until it hits you upside the head that, apparently, not all doctors know this fact to be true unless it’s published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Is it actually possible, I wondered at the time, that doctors thumbing through journals madly take notes when they discover a surprisingly shocking news flash like this?

Recently, I ran across yet another fine example of the bleedin’ obvious that makes me crazy-go-nuts, as my Ukrainian relatives would say. Continue reading “News flash: care improves when doctors consider the whole person” →

When heart patients meet the Black Swan

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 21 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

blackswan_johngouldI have a little ritual as soon as I board the ferry from my island home for the one hour and 40 minute sailing  over to the mainland: I make a stop at the magazine rack of the B.C. Ferries gift shop. It has something to do with both the beautifully tactile feel of a new magazine and its clear association in my brain with almost every ferry ride I’ve ever taken through our west coast Gulf Islands.

That, and a pack of Mentos . . .

During last week’s sailing to Vancouver, we had barely settled into our front row seats in the forward lounge with the Mentos and a copy of Psychology Today in hand before I was riveted by editor Kaja Perina‘s third page commentary. She writes about something called the Black Swan, a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment.   Continue reading “When heart patients meet the Black Swan” →

When doctors use words that hurt

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 23 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Consider hearing the scary diagnosis of “heart failure” tripping lightly from your doctor’s lips as if it were no big deal. Can there be anything more terrifying and demoralizing than hearing that your heart is “failing”?  And the words don’t even  accurately reflect this condition, which actually means that your heart is not pumping blood as well as it should. 

So why did doctors come up with this heart failure name, and what on earth were they thinking when they decided it would be a good idea to actually say these words out loud to Real Live Patients? And is there a less hurtful term they could use instead?   Continue reading “When doctors use words that hurt” →

‘Healthy Privilege’ – when you just can’t imagine being sick

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 43 Comments

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by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

Have you had the experience of knowing something intuitively, but without realizing that the thing you know already has a name?  For example, have you ever found yourself limping along on the losing end of an argument, yet  only much later (when it was far too late!) you suddenly thought of just the perfectly witty retort that you should have come up with? 

There’s a name for that. The French call this ‘l’esprit d’escalier’, literally “the wit of the staircase”.  You’re welcome.

Similarly, I’ve been writing for some time about my niggling frustration over something else that I didn’t even realize had an actual name.  Continue reading “‘Healthy Privilege’ – when you just can’t imagine being sick” →