I caught the end of Jan Wong’s interview on Metro Morning on CBC Radio 1 Monday last week. Matt Galloway asked her why she wrote her book Out of the Blue. She answered with an experience I find so familiar. People think we have freedom of speech in Canada, but lawyers routinely muzzle Canadians. Privacy [...]
Personal
Sooo … I was in a clinical trial recently. It was, uh, interesting being on the other side of the guinea pig fence. The drug did more than expected. And then it was taken away! But I get ahead of myself. It was March 1 when this story began. I saw a new specialist and [...]
Standard of care. It’s a phrase that gets tossed around a lot. Let me tell you a story about what it should not be, especially for a person in a drug research trial. Before I begin, a note on my background. I grew up as the daughter of a clinician-researcher who is to this day, [...]
Weight loss. The entirety of North American society is grappling with weight loss. With diet. With exercise. With staying at a healthy weight. But believe it or not, people with brain injuries struggle even more than the typical North American. We struggle more because we may no longer be able to perceive that one’s stomach [...]
Talking about Port with a friend today reminded me of my last meal. I don’t mean the meal I had last night or the one I had the night previous to the crash that altered my life, but the last one I cooked and baked and wholeheartedly threw myself into for friends and family for [...]
An elderly gent said to me: you look…you look alive! This gent has known me a long time, starting in what I call my hell years after I had suffered a closed head injury aka traumatic brain injury. Back then, I used to see him weekly, yet when I spotted him one time in a [...]
It’s me and the men. Fat men. Snoring men. Young men. And extremely picky men. That latter is a new one to me in my five (six?) sleep studies. Seriously, does this guy think a hospital is going to purchase his preferred kind of sheets just for him? It’s not like in the pre-bed bug [...]
A new year, another new doctor. The first thing my new specialist said as soon as I sat down was: I know what your problem is. Pause. You have physician fatigue. No kidding. Astute. I don’t recall another doctor noticing that on their own or, if have, acknowledging it openly to me. I immediately paid [...]
Boy, did I fall down on the job. I thought I’d written a final follow-up post on my case manager saga. I hadn’t! Oops. In a nutshell: a total 180. I met with my new case manager in the afternoon. He spent one and a half hours familiarizing himself with my needs, writing down a [...]











