by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
The freshly-diagnosed hospital patient often goes from the shock of being hospitalized to the shock of being sent home before we’re feeling quite ready to return there. .
Continue reading “Goodbye, hospital. Hello, home! And other scary things.”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
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. Continue reading “A solution in search of a problem”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
What does jet lag have in common with being discharged home following a hospital stay? After Yale cardiologist Dr. Harlan Krumholz returned from an overseas trip suffering from a particularly bad case of jet lag, he described the similarities like this:
” People were talking to me, but I couldn’t concentrate. I was a little clumsy. I could have fallen. I realized that I felt just like my hospital patients do when they go home.”
He recognized that many hospital stays can actually confer jet lag-type disabilities. In his article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Krumholz dubbed this post-hospital discharge distress post-hospital syndrome. (1)
Continue reading “Post-hospital syndrome, revisited”
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