Bill Kearns, one of our stroke survivors, is the person who spoke these words.
He is a 76 year old gentleman who works in sales at Massanutten Resort. He was getting his morning cup of coffee at work and noticed that he couldn’t grasp his coffee cup the way he would normally hold it…and then he dropped it. He started feeling weakness on the right side of his body. He went to walk and sit down, but could not do that either. It was a co-worker, also an EMT, that recognized Bill was having a stroke. His coworker loaded him in the car driving 70 miles an hour and in the process called EMS and the police. ED was called in advance and they were waiting for his arrival.
I often share or talk with groups about my cancer experience. I speak many times to nursing classes or health education classes, I assume because they can get two for the price of one. I am a nurse and I am also a cancer survivor.
Many times the students ask me what they can do as future nurses that might make a difference in working with patients. This is a great question and if I can give a face to patients that they may care for in the future I will have done my job. When answering this question I usually share a specific story from my journey.
Research over the last couple of years is showing consistently that there is a lower incidence of a number of cancers in people who eat healthier diets and exercise regularly. Plus, if you are a cancer survivor, you significantly decrease your chance for a recurrence if you exercise and eat a healthy. This is especially true for women with breast cancer.
I have thought a lot about that in the six years since I completed all my treatment and surgeries related to my breast cancer. A couple of years ago, if someone had told me, “Take this pill every day and you will decrease the chance that your cancer will return by 50%,” I wouldn’t have been able to swallow it fast enough!
Often in a weight loss journey, individuals will hit something called a plateau—that inevitable point when the pounds are not coming off as quickly as they had been or you’ve stopped losing weight entirely for a period of time. Many people can become frustrated by this and decide that “exercise just doesn’t work!” When dealing with plateaus, however, it is important to not only understand what changes are going on inside your body, but also the correct way to get out of a plateau.
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As a JMU student, you could say that I have lived in the university’s “bubble”. However, with each year at college, I have become gradually more familiar with the Harrisonburg area and all of the wonderful things that a small-town setting has to offer. From exploring downtown, I realize that one of the most appealing qualities about the ‘burg is the quaint, humble feeling that I get here. In the bustling, northern Virginia area that I grew up in, things are much faster paced and often times I think people miss out on enjoying the smaller things in life.
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The weather is sunny and warm and it is the perfect time to get outside with friends and family for a meal. The act of eating outside can be traced back as far as the 14th century and is still a large part of many household traditions when the weather gets warm. These gatherings are often pot-luck and just like eating out at a restaurant, it can be difficult to know what you’re eating when you don’t prepare it yourself. You can still enjoy the food and the fun with these simple strategies for eating well at cookouts, barbecues and picnics:
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I was reading a medical article the other day and they were talking about the fact that cancer patients need to have realistic hope. I stopped and thought, do those two terms really belong together, and does hope always have to be realistic? Then I saw someone differentiate between Therapeutic Hope, which is what health care providers generally feel most comfortable with, and general individual Hope.
The author (Elizabeth J Clark) identified several principles about individual hope that I wanted to share with you…
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