An excerpt from How to Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness: A Mindful Guide. Copyright 2015 by Toni Bernhard. Excerpted with permission from Wisdom Publications.
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
– Marcel Proust
For the most part, I’ve adjusted to my new …
Beware of “Good Old Days Syndrome”
Dear health care industry:
I think we have a serious problem, and I think we both deserve some of the blame. Over the last couple of decades, I the patient have been demanding many things of you: reduced wait times, increased access to medications and procedures, more luxurious and colorful accommodations, and numerous scheduling conveniences among other things.
Meanwhile, I have watched as an industry long-based on the revered call of service …
Dear health care industry: Give me what I need, not what I want
“Don’t ever land in a teaching hospital on a holiday weekend, they always staff up with residents,” noted a close friend who was all too familiar with the inner workings of hospitals.
That statement sticks in my head heavily today as I prepare to visit my father’s year-old grave. My father, a man that was involved in the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) and private sector research societies for decades, …
Don’t land in the teaching hospital on a holiday weekend
On July 3, 2015, at approximately 2:00 a.m., I was awakened by my mobile phone ringing. I looked at the number the call was originating from and was fearful this was the call I was dreading to receive. My mother’s long-term care facility was calling, and the news was not good. My mother was found without a pulse and was rushed to a local hospital.
I called the emergency department of …
3 ways to improve your delivery of bad news to patients
Have you ever been a patient? Yeah, me too. Many newly insured Americans will visit doctors’ offices this year. The average time you — or anyone — has with a primary care provider is 15 minutes. What’s a sick person to do?
Happier patients make happier doctors. Here’s a helpful list that I’ve developed to help patient visits go smoother:
1. Pick three questions or concerns that you have for your doctor and write …
10 helpful ways to improve your patient experience
For years, and especially as he entered his nineties, my father kept begging me not to “dump” him into a nursing home. He had seen too many of his cronies abandoned in this way by family members; his visits with these friends left him feeling depressed and hopeless for days. I assured Dad that I’d never put him in a facility.
It was an easy promise to make. I didn’t want …
Bringing Dad home from the nursing facility was the right decision
I am one of many people today “living” with cancer. I want to focus on the impact cancer has on my personal finances, and this is probably true for any chronic illness, not just cancer.
First, you often have to give up your job. While undergoing chemo, most of us don’t have the energy for a full time job. And if you do …
This is what it’s like to face recurrent cancer while going broke
The woman lying on the transport cot in the examination room was terrified. I could see it plainly in her eyes, but there was no time to stop and comfort her.
I was a young, recently graduated nurse in a busy urban emergency room, struggling to keep up with its daily array of shootings, stabbings and crises. ER nurses hustled. We dealt with …
She became a hospice nurse because of this story
I thank God every day that a doctor had the audacity to say to me, “You are going to have to learn to live with this.”
I was 21. Newly married. And covered, from head to toe, in a burning, painful, itchy rash.
I was sitting on a table, decked in a gown, with my husband in a chair by my side. I was …
Humanize your physician: They are real people
Well, decision time was here and it looked as if Bill would choose surgery, and why not, with the doctors liberally throwing around the word “cure.'” The various tests Bill endured, breathing tests, echocardiogram and MRI of the brain, were all within tolerable ranges, we were told. The oncologist noted some marks in the brain that suggested mini-strokes, but Bill didn’t hear this or it didn’t register with him, or …
Surgery in a patient with schizophrenia. Did it affect decision making?
November of last year found me living as best I could with several health issues, the most debilitating of which stems from never having recovered from a serious viral infection in 2001. I’ve been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, a little understood and much-misunderstood illness. It keeps me virtually housebound. For the most part, I’ve made peace with feeling sick all …
You can never be prepared for a diagnosis of breast cancer
Ask anyone connected with health care these days to provide a definition for patient engagement and you will likely receive as many answers as there are agendas surrounding the discipline.
While patient engagement has evolved as a critical strategy in support of the ultimate goal of creating improved health for a total population, you would think that a mandate for a unified …
Patient engagement is in search of a definition
A version of this speech was delivered May 14, 2015 to the graduating class at the University of Manitoba.
I’m not a doctor. I never will be. I’m a lowly journalist. I tell stories. For almost 30 years, I’ve tried to help Canadians understand their health system and their medical care.
In that time, I’ve seen tremendous advances in medicine and I’ve met, quite literally, thousands of health professionals, from students to …
We have built a sickness care system rather than a health system
In 2008, at the age of 22, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and began my experience with the American health care system and how to care for myself in it. When I was in the process of diagnosing my illness, I went to Oregon Health and Science University in Portland to meet with an endocrinologist and have my ultrasound results interpreted. …
Managing your health is difficult on a student’s budget
Statistics from the Pew Research Center indicate that the majority of people use the Internet to find information on health. As online resources improve and proliferate, this fraction will continue to climb higher. There is no doubt that patients see the Internet as one tool to learn about a condition, diagnose themselves, or read about the range of treatment alternatives. Patients understand that knowledge is power. So how should patients …
How patients can use Internet research when seeing a doctor
While there are worse times to sprain an ankle and chip a bone than just one week before a longawaited trip to Venice, I couldn’t think of one as I sat in the emergency room for eight hours last fall.
Venice, the place of canals and not cars; ancient bridges sans escalators. How ironic that just a few days before I was crowing to my husband over my hotel coup. A …
The saga of the boot illustrates the problem of health care costs
Recently a neighbor of mine was in our local hospital for several weeks undergoing treatment for MRSA and dehydration. Polly is a woman in her late seventies who is completely alert and oriented. She lives an active and independent lifestyle and is fully capable of understanding and communicating clearly with others.
I asked her adult daughter how her mother’s experience had been so far. Given that this is a hospital that …
Improve patient satisfaction with these common sense tips
Before I got into medical school, while I was still in my first year of graduate school, I learned what hell was like.
The hospital was a rabbit warren. Walking down the long empty beige halls fueled my hatred for hospitals. And, of the color beige.
When I volunteered during college, I would press myself up against the wall whenever a gaggle of doctors passed by. They ruled the hospital: powerful, scary, …
Hospitals are not built for doctors. Hospitals are for patients and their families.
On October 10, 2013, the Boston Public Library held an author event featuring Dr. Sheri Fink, she of the MD/PhD braininess that appears to be in constant triage mode; she famously skipped her own medical school graduation to assist refugees on the Kosovo-Macedonia border during the war in Kosovo. Five Days at Memorial had recently come out, and her talk that early fall evening definitely had the feel of a …
Mediphilia: Self-diagnosed with a love of doctors
I’ve been volunteering in an emergency department of a Southern Californian community hospital for five years. I clean gurneys, stock shelves, provide support for RNs and EMTs and translate for Spanish-speaking patients. Since my job requires minimal intellectual effort, I’ve had considerable time to observe the staff and contemplate the inspiring work they do.
I’ve watched them perform heroically with sick babies, …
Doctors and nurses vs. administrators on patient satisfaction. Who’s right?
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