by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
In the year 2000, I started working in the field of hospice palliative care.
That experience was more profoundly educational than any university course I’ve ever taken, any book I’ve ever read, any personal growth workshop I’ve shelled out money for.
And the biggest lessons I learned over these years stemmed from one simple truism:
“There is no ‘Fair Fairy’ in life.” Continue reading “There is no “Fair Fairy” in life”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
I’m very pleased to share this with you, my heart sisters – although this is not a happy story. It’s essentially the journal of a heart attack. The author is Dr. Barbara Keddy, a teacher of nurses, professor emerita at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and author of the book Women and Fibromyalgia* – a condition that Barbara herself has lived with for over 40 years. Barbara and I first “met” each other online when we both happened to be named recipients of the 2009 Women’s Health Hero awards from Our Bodies Ourselves of Boston that year – she representing the east coast of Canada, and I out here on the west.
I’ve been reading her Women & Fibromyalgia blog and quoting her wise words ever since (here, here and here, for example). And we’ve been casually emailing back and forth for four years – until one day in January, when I received a terse one-line message from her: she had just survived a heart attack.
Barbara’s experience is unique because she’d already been living with the constant pain of a debilitating chronic illness for decades. What happens when such a person gets hit with the double whammy of a serious heart attack on top of everything else? Here’s her story, in her own words: Continue reading “Dr. Barbara Keddy: “I was pitifully ignorant about heart disease””
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Heart attack survivors often celebrate two birthday milestones during the year: the actual day they were born, and the fateful day they survived that heart attack. When I read Elizabeth’s reflections last month on the occasion of her 4-year “heart-iversary”, I asked if I could share her journey of recovery with you here.
With Elizabeth’s kind permission, here’s what this 47-year old Virginia mother of two wrote: Continue reading “From heart-sick to heart-smart”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
You’d hardly expect a physician who spends his life trying to cure cancer to suddenly shift gears and suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should “stop trying”. But it turns out that New Jersey oncologist Dr. James Salwitz agrees with a review of data published in the September 2012 issue of Lancet Oncology, entitled “First Do No Harm: Counting the Cost of Chasing Drug Efficacy.” *
An accompanying Lancet editorial suggests that during the 10 years between 2000 and 2010, “many new cancer drugs produced marginal extensions in survival and simultaneously increased risk of treatment-associated death and side effects.” This compelled Dr. Salwitz to write: Continue reading ““Live a healthy life, then die quickly at 90””
Heart Sisters 