I Want The Women In My Family To Know This

Women and Heart Disease: The Real Story

Author: Jacqueline A. Eubany, MD, FACC, FHRS

Self-Published in: Mission Viejo, California, 2016

Dr. Jacqueline Eubany, an American cardiologist, starts out to write a straight-forward, easy to understand, comprehensive, all you need to know “before you have a heart attack” book for women. And she succeeds with honors. In the process, I am sure she has helped hundreds of men.

With well-placed simple diagrams and short sections on key topics, this book is very well organized. And she gives us facts that are easy to remember such as “Heart disease is the number one killer of American women”. She explains why women often get misdiagnosed or diagnosed late, reducing the chance of full recovery. Her bottom line messages to each of us are: 1. Unhealthy lifestyles contribute to heart disease bigtime and 2. Time is tissue which she explains fully. She taught me, very effectively, about four different categories of heart disease and their risks and the symptoms to look for in myself and the women I love.

Then she deals with each of the lifestyles (using real examples from her practice) and showing us how these contribute to the disease.  She addresses: cigarette smoking, physical inactivity [simple lesson here: duration beats intensity and frequency], diet [here she tells you what’s good, what’s not so good, and then she discusses four modern diet plans including the Mediterranean, the DASH, the TLC, and the low carbohydrate], alcohol, weight, hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, and the metabolic syndrome. From there she discusses hormone replacement therapy, aspirin as preventative measure, and antioxidants (sorry, supplements won’t cut it).

Highly recommended for women, and for the men that love them. In fact, I hope the author finds a cardiologist of like mind that can follow her formula and write a book for men. (In fact, if there is one, please let me know.)

When I finished reading her book, I felt much more informed than I was two years ago when my own wife had a heart attack. And I even felt better about recognizing one in myself.

Whenever Christmas rolls around again, this book makes a great stocking stuffer.

Ken B. Godevenos, President, Accord Resolutions Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, November 19, 2016. www.accordconsulting.com

Get the book here: http://astore.amazon.com/accorconsu-20

It would be great if you would share your thoughts or questions on this blog in the comments section below or on social media.

Why Did She Jump? Looking For Answers To Suicide Questions Can Be Devastating

Why Did She Jump? My Daughter’s Battle with Bipolar Disorder

Author: Joan E. Childs, LCSW

Published by: Health Communications, Inc., Deerfield Beach, Florida, 2014

Looking For Answers To Suicide Questions Can Be Devastating

I wanted to learn more about suicide, especially, suicide resulting from a bipolar disorder. I also wanted to read a detailed account of what a parent felt like burying their child when, all else being equal, we expect things to turn out the other way around – a child burying an older parent. I also had skin in this, as just over three years ago we buried our infant grandson.

This book provided what I was looking for, but I must admit that this review was one of the hardest for me to write. So, let me come clean. To accomplish my task, I had to separate in my mind Joan Childs the author of this book (who was easily liked and even admired) from Joan Childs, the mother of Pamela, who committed suicide by jumping out of a 15-storey window at age 34. The latter Joan was more difficult for me to embrace.

The title of the book is a misnomer. While we learn a lot about Pam and her life and death, we learn as much, if not more about her mother’s life. Joan Childs intended very much to focus on Pam, and perhaps she has. She certainly gives us some food for thought as we read helpful gems like, “Perhaps the best we can do is to remember what we had and not what we lost.” I am not so sure those two are mutually exclusive but I get her point. But then time and time again the focus returns to her (or us, as readers – and maybe that’s the saving grace in her style) when she writes, “The emotional scars stay forever. As time passes, we must make a choice between being a victim or being a survivor. The decision may determine how you live the rest of your life.”

Like a loving mother searching for answers Joan blames many others (and to be fair that includes herself) for Pam’s death – but clearly the number one culprit in her mind is the “ineffective, dysfunctional health system”. A close second is Pam’s father who refused to believe she was sick until it was too late and who pushed her to get her Ph.D.

Childs has taken great pain to educate us about the statistics regarding mental health suicides in our society. But she has also given us lots of ‘stats’ with respect to her own life – perhaps stats we didn’t really need to know. She talks about her four husbands and others who never were officially given the title with great details about their relationship, the places they bought and lived in together, their tenure, their fights, and how they died or why they left. One can only ask “Why Joan? Were all these details necessary in telling us about your daughter’s death?”

There is no doubt in this reader’s mind that Joan, the mother, tried her very best to be all that she could be for Pamela and her other children. One gets the feeling though she may have been trying too hard in some areas. Or not hard enough in others. While she made all the sacrifices she felt necessary – there were areas where she chose to put herself first. These included her education and her love life. She sees others as being “too-dependent and complaining” (her son’s wife) and fails to see how some of her own choices may have impacted Pamela. And while one could say I’m being too hard on her for “look at her other four children, they all turned out just fine, thank you”, I could only respond in the way she responds to the topic of medication. Childs writes:

“. . . some medications will work effectively with some of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.”

Likewise, some of the choices Joan may have made may have had no impact on four of the children, but may well have impacted Pamela in ways we will never know. But then again as a single-mom with five children, who could blame her. However, at one point in the book, Joan writes,

“Nearly twenty-four years after my daughter Pam was born, I started to realize how much closeness she was inadvertently denied.” And later, “I always wanted a healthy relationship [in reference to her own love life]. My history is not good. I experienced many painful breakups, many disappointments.”

Those are major admissions. And Childs has to be given full marks plus for them. Although she never comes to grips with how she lived and in the very end tells us, in reference to a dream piece of property she once had,

“Giving up that cabin is perhaps the only regret in my life.”

Throughout the book, one can see the many parallels between mother and daughter, not only in their dysfunctional relationships with men, but also in their education (both were successful therapists and even worked together). One wonders how much their own profession impacted how they viewed what was going on with each of them. As strange as it may sound, sometimes those outside the profession have a better chance of surviving mental disorders because they know so much less and thus aren’t impacted by that knowledge.

Joan and her family are Jewish and in many respects, most aware of God’s role in their lives. Combine that knowledge though with the field of social work or clinical psychotherapy and you get anger towards the Almighty and questions like “Where was God?” which leads to some very candid comments on her feelings towards Him. Unfortunately, in her search for answers, she augments her talks with God by dabbling in the occult, seeking messages from her departed loved one.

Perhaps I’ve been too hard on Joan Childs, but I felt that to be honest was what she would have expected of me. Having said that, this is a book I would strongly recommend to anyone who believes a loved one may have now, or is beginning to show, the signs of a mental illness called bipolar disorder. The author has poured herself out unreservedly in writing it and while she would be happy with just one person being helped, I am convinced her efforts will help hundreds.

-- Ken B. Godevenos, President, Accord Resolutions Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, November 17, 2016. www.accordconsulting.com

-- Get the book here: http://astore.amazon.com/accorconsu-20

It would be great if you would share your thoughts or questions on this blog in the comments section below or on social media.

Remember the 2004-12 TV Series Called “House”? Well, here we go again – only reality makes room for miracles

Miracles We Have Seen:

America’s Leading Physicians Share Stories They Can’t Forget

Editor: Harley A. Rotbart, MD

Published by: Health Communications, Inc., Deerfield Beach, Florida, 2016

                                          

I could not help but think of the TV show starring Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House as I read this book. But this time, these real doctors share stories of miraculous events that can’t be explained by medical science.  And they admit it. Some of them even attribute the outcomes to faith and God – often when nothing else can be credited with the interventions.

Seventy-five different medical professionals share their unforgettable stories. The editor almost always provides the reader the information and sources needed to follow up on these real cases. This is not only helpful but makes each story (most within our lifetime) even more real for the fact-checking, research-hungry, web-browsing enthusiast.

There is a big difference, as the book’s contributors point out, between declining proven medical treatments that are available and beneficial, choosing instead to wait for a miracle, and allowing doctors to do all they can to help save a loved one. The former approach often ends up in disappointment, while the latter allows room for miracles to occur when the science alone cannot.  That’s a major lesson we can draw from this book.

A number of stories hinge on the coincidences of location, timing, and/or the availability of the expertise. To the purpose of faith, the probability of such occurring together in any given case is too much to leave to chance, but that’s a decision each reader will have to make for themselves. Based on how these doctors write about the ‘miracle’ they share, I often wonder how many of them are ‘hidden believers’ in the Creator, but just won’t or can’t say it openly here. In this book, we seem to be getting the message, both doctors and family members, “Do your job and God (or miracles) will take care of the rest.” These doctors have learned that “beyond the limits of (their) medical knowledge and skill, there is also always the power of hope.”

One story that sticks in my mind is that told by Debra Gussman, MD, entitled “An Impossible Pregnancy”. That one alone will challenge your ‘unbeliefs’.

Miracles We Have Seen is also invaluable for teaching the non-medical reader so much about medicine and how our bodies work. What makes it particularly good in this way is that the editor(s) have made sure that the stories these professionals share are explained in ways that the average man and woman can understand.  I learned a lot. Here are but a few examples:

·      In one story entitled, It’s Alive! By Robert J. Buys, MD, we learn about an “embolus” (the term for any kind of substance that shouldn’t be there traveling through the bloodstream) and how doctors attempt to deal with one that is in the eye. Fascinating insight (no pun intended).

·      White blood cells being a sign of inflammation, the body’s response to infection and other foreign substances.

·      What doctors mean by the term “failure to thrive” when referring to children, that is, a condition in which growth and body weight are far below normal.

·      Transplanted hearts (or any organ for that matter) come with great challenges – nothing is better than the organs we were born with if we can keep them working well.

·      An ‘obtunded’ patient is one who is losing consciousness or difficult to arose.

·      As a general rule, “people who fall three stories. . . have about a fifty-fifty chance of survival.”

·      And many more things and terms and practices and discouragements. For example, the realization by doctors working in Africa that healing cannot be just “medical”, it is often economic, as one patient stares them in the eye and says, “Cure my poverty, and you will cure me.”

The stories in this book are divided into major chapters entitled: Spectacular Serendipity; Impossible Cures; Breathtaking Resuscitations (my favorite); Extraordinary Awakenings (my second favorite); Unimaginable Disasters; Mysterious Presence; Global Miracles (dealing with epidemics); Miracles In Their Own Time (a modern historical perspective); Paying It Forward; Difficult Decisions (my third favorite); Silver Linings; and Back To The Beginning (transforming doctors into professionals – a great piece of writing).

We learn how doctors, pediatricians in particular, have a hard time as they often project their own children onto their patients, sometimes “identifying so strongly that it’s difficult to stay objective”. Then there are the times when doctors feel, “Yes, we have saved a life, but to what end?” That’s the often haunting question when one knows the patient will live but not as one would have preferred.

And if that’s not enough, in the Epilogue we are told that 100% of the author proceeds are divided among 75 different charities designated by the contributors and listed in that section.

I had occasion to be in the hospital right after I read this book. It greatly enhanced my appreciation of the wonderful doctor that took care of me.  Very highly recommended by anyone who is a doctor or ever needs to see one.

·      Ken B. Godevenos, President, Accord Resolutions Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, November 13, 2016. www.accordconsulting.com

 Get the book here: http://astore.amazon.com/accorconsu-20

It would be great if you would share your thoughts or questions on this blog in the comments section below or on social media.

A Hardworking African-American Mother Inspires Us All

While Being A Parent

Author: Eddie Marie Durham

Published by: iUniverse LLC, Bloomington, Indiana, 2014

A Hardworking African-American Mother Inspires Us All

This is a book written by a hard-working, never-say-die, African-American mother of three boys. It is from the heart. She covers topics that many of us don’t discuss easily and she does it with almost childlike transparency. She believes in God. And she has had her shares of troubles. Anybody who has a sense of the woes of parenthood today needs to read this book. And while they’re at it, learn much about the modern African-American experience of life in America.

Let me say straight out that this is not a scholarly tome.  While she writes well, the book did not have the benefit of professional editing given the limited resources Eddie Marie Durham had –  what it got in that regard was a wonderful labor of love from a friend. So set that aside and don’t let it interfere with Eddie’s message – it just may help save your child and you.  Here is just a glimpse of what she shares.

As a trained educator, Eddie starts off with the premise of “you better know what you’re getting into if you’re thinking of becoming a parent.”  She was shocked when she learned about a group of young teens in her own school forming a pact to become ‘mothers’. In fact, much of the beginning of the book is intended to warn young women about having babies before “they really know what it’s all about.”  And she does so very capably.

Then she begins her specific lessons: Early she provides us with an educated view on discipline. It’s not a dirty word and it doesn’t always mean corporeal punishment. While she believes in spanking when totally necessary, she also recognizes that in today’s world where the social mores are against it, it is not appropriate for the most part.

Whatever she shares, she does it most frankly, especially on topics not easily talked about. One example is her husband’s earlier life and his son by another woman. And then there’s the experience she and her first son had with the Boy Scouts – heartbreaking, but handled well by Eddie.

What struck me while reading this book is the incredible similarity of hopes and cares or concerns and struggles and fears that this mother had with what many of us have experienced as parents.  Parenthood, at its foundation, is not bias to color.

She writes about the importance of two parents, a father and a mother in a child’s life, both of whom are partnering with God in the raising of that child. But Durham realizes that is not always possible.

Early in the book she lays out very clearly the importance of rules and quoting one of her devotional readings, she reminds us that the story behind the famous movie, Bonnie and Clyde, was indeed, “who raised Bonnie”. She then proceeds to share some gems she found with respect to rules – how to explain them; how to enforce; and what to avoid. She quotes one adolescent program director as follows: “When the responsibilities expected of children are significantly lower than the privileges allowed, that is a cause for concern.” Then shortly afterwards, she outlines her own mother’s unique set of 12 rules for her children as well as the reason(s) for each one. Well worth the book’s purchase for that alone. Lastly in this regard, Durham discusses the topic of homework and what it is meant to accomplish quoting considerable research on the topic.

She is not a big fan of television’s impact on children with respect to the reality of life. She shares how she dealt with her son’s sports accidents as well as her feelings about his first date. Handling the eldest son’s decision to move out was not easy. And then there were the serious illnesses that beset one of her son’s, then the wife of another, and then the author herself. Even the fact that her husband retired and hung around the house while she still worked and how that impacted the child-rearing, makes for an interesting read.  All excellently handled, providing for us a role model of what being a parent – even of grown-up adults is all about.

The author, a post-graduate educated elementary school teacher, now retired, resides in Texas. One of her passions throughout her career was to write poems, stories, and plays making difficult accounts more understandable to children of all ages, as well as a means of celebrating and remembering the event described. Durham often works these works into her writings as examples of what she as a parent was called to do sometimes.

We often hear of kids from tough lives succeeding because of what their mother was like – what she did, what she said at times, her sacrifices, how she showed her love even when things were tough and there was no money, and so on. Eddie Durham is one of those mothers – only she’s telling the story of her sons and how they got to be who they are. Personally, I consider myself fortunate to have come across Durham and her book.  I highly recommend it to all thinking of parenthood or those already in its throes.

·      Ken B. Godevenos, President, Accord Resolutions Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, October 28, 2016. www.accordconsulting.com

Get the book here: http://astore.amazon.com/accorconsu-20

It would be great if you would share your thoughts or questions on this blog in the comments section below or on social media.

A Historical Novel With Details Only A Doctor Can Provide

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The Dash of Dr. Todd: The Odyssey of a Frontier Doctor

Author: Howard E. Adkins, M.D.

Published by: Xlibris, Boise, Idaho, 2009

 

Okay, I must admit two things: I hardly ever read novels. Secondly, when I embarked on the pages of this book, I really believed it wasn’t a novel. In fact, I thought that the author had researched the lead character, his great-grandfather, in a very thorough historical manner and was providing us with the details of his life to the best of his knowledge. And yes, throughout the reading of this great work, I did not for a moment doubt the fact that everything that Howard E. Adkins wrote could indeed have come to pass, just as he described it. It was only when preparing to write this review did I notice the page that said, “Other Novels by Howard E. Adkins”. Wow, talk about a personal surprise as a reader.

This is the story of a “dash” – the little mark that is inserted between the date of one’s birth and the date of one’s death on a tombstone. It is the dash of Daniel Locke Todd, M.D.  It starts off in the eastern part of the United States in 1825 and takes us excitedly around Cape Horn and on to Oregon, finally saying good-bye in Idaho City, Idaho in 1868. There the life, and the dash, of Dr. Todd ended.  But what a life and a dash it was.

Author Adkins is a pro at presenting us with a man’s thoughts, goals, struggles. He is even more of a master at helping us understand the limitations of our knowledge at any given time, especially when it comes to miracles of medical science. But I was amazed at how skillfully he described (writing for both medical and non-medically trained readers) just what could be done to help relieve suffering and pain, as well as how to ease one’s last days or hours of life, in the 1800’s, and in remote places at that.

I’ll let you discover all that for yourselves. What I want to share in this review is some of the hard questions of life that Adkins exposes us to through Dr. Todd. In fact, one of the main themes of the work is Todd’s life-long search for his own purpose.  Early we read his thoughts on possibly dying before he even had a chance to practice medicine, as the author shares them, “. . . if there is a God in the Heavens, surely he would not allow such vast tracts of knowledge to be crammed into my brain and then waste it all by letting that mind die and rot unused.”

And then there’s the truth that comes from one of his medical instructors after being defeated in the delivery of a baby whose position is a “transverse lie” (i.e. according to Wikipedia, the baby has his head to one of his mother's sides and the bottom across her abdomen at her other side. This is normal before 26 weeks, but by 29-30 weeks we expect babies to be head down, or at least breech). The doctor remarks, “There is a razor’s edge between a very normal birth and a disaster such as this. We, as doctors, are supposed to make a difference, make more of them normal, but we are not always successful. Your goal as a doctor, Todd, must be to do a better job than I have just done here.” Accepting that very fact is sometimes just as hard on doctors as it is on the patients and their families.

A good portion of the book is also about being lost at sea – not just in terms of bearings. And the author has taken great care to introduce us to the life of whalers and their work during that period. It’s a remarkable feat he has accomplished. Adkins’ account of the whaling industry’s history alone is well worth the time spent in reading this book.

At one point, as Dr. Todd deals with a suicidal patient’s intervention, he begins to describe the human mind to him and asks, “Does anybody you know have the knowledge and skill to build any sort of machine that complicated? What do you think, Elias?” Todd was really asking himself that very question.

The main character was also prone to thoughts of crime especially of people he considered to be vile and abusive towards others, even to the extent of plotting to take their lives for the honor of their victims.  In fact, when one of his intended targets dies by other means, and is given the briefest of funerals, Todd reflects on the deceased person’s just desserts, thinking his “demise was welcomed by many, accepted by some and mourned by nobody.” Is this what life is meant to be for some?

Watching over a dying patient, Todd reflects on the necessity that “throughout life (one) simply must breathe in and breathe out, one breath at a time, and wait to see what the next minute holds. . .. Just have faith and patience – faith and patience.” But he himself has neither.

The author tackles abortion in one long paragraph in a very unique way – from the perspective of a conscientious doctor struggling with the matter of predestination at the same time. Elsewhere we are treated to the anguish involved in a person’s inability to help another person when he/she believes that this is his/her very purpose in life.

As I had made these notes, I realized I had not even reached halfway through the story. From there on, I could not even stop long enough to make notes for later use.  Adkins had me entangled in the plot of Dr. Todd’s ‘dash’.  There was love, loss, failure, success, hardship, epidemics, hatred, poverty, hunger, sickness, fraud, and so much more. There was even murder before the dash reached its final resting place.

I must stop now because my wife wants the book and she’s waited long enough. And then her friend wants it. Highly recommended – even for those that don’t read novels.

·      Ken B. Godevenos, President, Accord Resolutions Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, October 23, 2016. www.accordconsulting.com

Get the book here: http://astore.amazon.com/accorconsu-20

It would be great if you would share your thoughts or questions on this blog in the comments section below or on social media.

The Truth May Be Lost In Its Delivery

The Real Bible Truth: A Great Deception Has Been Wrought On The World

Author: Ernie Hasler

Published by: self-published, Charleston, S.C., 2016

Author Ernie Hasler has searched for biblical truths in many places and he believes the Bible has been corrupted in some very significant ways. Hasler shows us, to the best of his ability, that our main religions – Judaism and Christianity – have been wrong about the origin of the symbol of the cross, the name of the Creator, and more.

He presents his readers with some interesting statements and positions. A lot of them make sense. He seldom, however, backs up his claims with appropriate sources or research which frustrates any reader that may have different views. For example, how does he know the early versions of The Tanakh (original Hebrew writings of the O.T.) were written in Paleo-Hebrew beginning from the 5^th BCE onward? Or that the council of Laodicia passed a law requiring Christians to not become “Judaized by resting on Saturday”? Or that the introduction of the word ‘Lord’ was really a substitute for ‘Ba’al’? He does the same with the dating of the ‘Tetragrammaton’, the Hebrew name of God transliterated in four letters as YHWH or JHVH and articulated as Yahweh or Jehovah. Perhaps all believable claims but certainly not substantiated with any hard evidence.

Where he does give a source of information, it often is one that is questionable as in the Dictionary of Christian Lore and Legend from which he states that the name of Yeshua has been replaced by the names of G-zeus (Jesus), and (Ea-zeus), which are absolutely pagan in origin, according to Hasler. He quotes the Catholic Encyclopedia, volume and page, when he introduces the idea of a great deception we have all been exposed to concerning the existence of Christianity in the time of Constantine as well as his ‘conversion’ and ‘baptism’.

His material is well worth being aware of, but it could benefit from some serious editing and more verification. What may be intuitive to Hasler isn’t necessarily intuitive for others. Perhaps the greatest contribution that Ernie Hasler has made though in this mini-volume (the entire book is only 81 pages from cover to cover) is the last 31 pages in which he lists and numbers all 613 commandments found in the Old Testament books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, complete with description and Scripture chapter and verse.

Hasler has written another book and in its title is the word “Conspiracy” which is missing from this one. There’s no doubt though that he sees much of the corruption he claims is present in Scripture to be just that – a conspiracy. What this book will do for an avid Bible student is allow him/her to take Hasler’s claims (for they are intriguing) and do his/her own more academic study and research in order to ascertain the “truth” in a more convincing manner, be it what Hasler claims or otherwise.

* Ken B. Godevenos, President, Accord Resolutions Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, September 24, 2016. www.accordconsulting.com

* Get the book here: http://astore.amazon.com/accorconsu-20

It would be great if you would share your thoughts or questions on this blog in the comments section below or on social media.