I am clueless about many things. As in the definition: “Lacking understanding or knowledge.” As in the sentence: “I have no clue!” As in the 20+ years I spent living with a research scientist and enduring mind-numbingly torturous dinner party conversations about zinc and copper sediment in the Fraser River estuary.
That kind of clueless.
Continue reading “If you’re clueless and you know it . . .”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
It took a while to improve upon the humble pedometer. This wearable device, typically attached on or near one’s waist, has been tracking how many steps and how much distance we travel each day ever since its invention by Abraham-Louis Perrelet back in 1780.
But with the explosion of wearable digital activity trackers on the market, I’m now waiting for the randomized control trial that compares those fancy-schmancy new devices head to head with that simple old-fashioned pedometer. In other words:
Q: Just because you make it digital, does it make it better?
Continue reading “Self-tracking device? Got it. Tried it. Ditched it.”
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”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Shortly after arriving at Stanford University School of Medicine to attend the conference called Medicine X (“at the intersection of medicine and emerging technologies”), it hit me that I didn’t quite belong there. Maybe, I wondered, the conference organizers (like the profoundly amazing Dr. Larry Chu) might have goofed by awarding me an “ePatient Scholarship“ – rather than a more tech-savvy, wired and younger patient in my stead.
Please don’t get me wrong – I was and still am duly thrilled and humbled to be chosen as one of 30 participants invited to attend MedX as ePatient scholars, generously funded by Alliance Health based on meeting selection criteria like “a history of patient engagement, community outreach and advocacy”.
But almost immediately, I started feeling like a bit of a fraud. Continue reading “When the elephant in the room has no smartphone”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Before surviving a heart attack in 2008, I never gave my heart more than a passing thought (except maybe when slogging up that brutal Quadra Street hill with my running group on our way back to the Y). But after my heart attack and accompanying shock, disbelief, grief and anger, I became just a wee bit obsessed. I threw myself into boning up on women’s symptoms, risk factors, diagnostics, treatments and emerging cardiac research as if I were cramming for some kind of imminent cardiology midterm.
I applied to attend the annual WomenHeart Science & Leadership Symposium for Women With Heart Disease at Mayo Clinic – and then became the first Canadian ever accepted for this patient advocacy training. I subscribed to daily cardiology bulletins and heart institutes’ news feeds. I launched this blog, Heart Sisters, and have written 500+ articles here so far. I’ve given presentations about women’s heart health to thousands of people. And I applied for media accreditation so I could interview cardiac researchers attending the 64th annual Canadian Cardiovascular Congress (the first of many I would attend over the years) – where I was shocked to find that only four of the 700 scientific papers presented at this conference were even remotely focused on women’s heart disease. I find this subject both astonishing and compelling, and am almost insufferably preoccupied with All Things Cardiac.
Just recently, I came across a term that seems to capture the kind of person I’ve become, post-heart attack: an “information flâneur”. Or, more appropriately, a flâneuse, the female version of this affliction. Continue reading “How a heart attack turned me into an “information flâneuse””
Heart Sisters 