Record breaking athlete Aimee Mullins delivers an outstanding talk that properly redefines the word ‘disabled’.

Heatheran talks about her experience with ovarian cancer. She is a survivor but becoming one was not easy, this is her story.

By Andrea Shewchuk

What is care?

What is caring?

Who is the “care” in healthcare”?

What is the worth of a pear.

It’s Sunday September 30th, and in 6 days it will be one year since I found myself in the Emergency Room for the second time, afflicted with appendicitis (which I fondly refer to as “Appendicitis II”). Now, I am enjoying a day of knitting, yoga and quiet and, a pear.

This time I was in a cozy ER room within earshot and a good view of the nurses’ station. I had been at a play earlier that evening, ignoring the familiar pain, hoping it was just the play and the result of rushing through dinner.

The ER physician told me that the pain couldn’t be “that bad” because I refused the morphine. I told her that I practice yoga and am able my voice trails off as she leaves the room. She was replaced by 2 young male nurses. The trainee was instructed on the insertion of my IV (saline), at which he was unsuccessful many times. Though I am generally an assertive person, I was watching and weighing the consequences of voicing my concerns about the growing number of punctures on my arm vs. how they may be interpreted. I decided to ask [...] continue the story

By Andrea Shewchuk

Almost 11 p.m.

We looked out of the 14th floor wall of windows at the orange CN Tower. The CN Tower was lit different colours to mark seasons or occasions. It was that time of an evening or that time anytime when something happens and all truth can be spoken and it’s safe. You just “know” that “time”. We had just come back from a walk around “the lap”. “The lap” was the obstacle course of gown and other disposal units, nurses’ trolleys and other walkers rather than safe passage for people with disconnected abdominal muscles and the impediment of an over-sized, shapeless, hopeless gown with malfunctioning closures to be managed concurrently with an IV in tow.

My room-mate was J. She had a gaping wound that ran several inches vertically from her chest down her abdomen. The doctors had left it open to “heal” after having worked on it in the afternoon. I wondered where I was. I thought of the movie Beautiful Dreamers.

J. had recovered from surgery to remove part of her colon because it was so damaged from one of the many possible syndromes, conditions and dis-eases that we have names for. And then a year later, she wasn’t feeling well and it was discovered that the [...] continue the story

By Michelle Lemme

Twelve weeks of Day Treatment and 8 weeks of Anxiety Clinic all come down to being mindful; actively participating and staying in the present. Sounds easy right? Not so much. Just ask anyone who lives with chronic anxiety, (anxious predictions lie in the future, not the present), depression, bipolar, OCD or any other mental health challenge. My prediction is that they would tell you that being mindful takes practice, dedication, and focus and that sometimes it is just plain hard work.

Don’t get me wrong, I get why “all roads lead to mindfulness“. When you are actively focused on the present, there quite literally is no room for those pesky, irksome “should haves”, “could haves”, and “what ifs” that can drag us back into the past or take us to some imagined crisis in the future.

Being mindful requires living with uncertainty (frankly, just typing the word causes my heart rate to accelerate). Personally, when the gnawing, nagging fear of uncertainty starts to take over, I do my best to quickly identify the thought, push it away, and then deal with it in my “worry” place (area reserved for worrying, where I challenge and then change the worry thought triggering [...] continue the story