by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Open heart surgery. Is there any medical procedure in history so surrounded by genuine awe and surreal mystique? Cracking open the sternum to reveal the beating heart beneath, and then somehow trusting a heart-lung machine to temporarily take over the jobs of both the human heart and lungs – now, that’s heroic! But when it comes to explaining just how that happens, few of us might guess that the most compelling and straightforward description comes not from the world of medicine, but from the venerable magazine, Popular Mechanics.
Continue reading “Heading home tips following open heart surgery”
I recently had the honour of being invited to be the guest lecturer at a university class of young students learning about chronic illness. (The word “young”, of course, is relative, since almost everybody on earth is now so much younger than I am). These students were absolutely terrific – enthusiastic, smart, full of questions and ideas about healthcare. But about halfway through our 3-hour class together, I began to observe a pattern in the way some of them approached their small group exercise assignment. 
As I love to keep saying, my 
They say that if you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t there. I do remember this about 1966, however: I spent my birthday that year in a hospital bed, where I’d been a patient for a full month recuperating from a ruptured appendix and a nasty case of peritonitis. Back then during the dawn of civilization, it was common for patients to spend far longer in hospital than we ever would now. For example:
Heart Sisters 
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters