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Articles Living Healthy Living Healthy in Atlantic Canada
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You know that queasy feeling you get when you’ve lost your balance and are falling backwards. It’s akin to slipping on ice — going past the zero-gravity point, and waiting to find out whether your tailbone or the back of your skull will feel the impact first. 
Given
the uncertainty surrounding global supplies of wheat, corn and rice,
the United Nations has turned its attention to potatoes, declaring 2008
the International Year of the Potato. Being in the limelight has raised
the potato’s profile, encouraging people to learn more about the
nutritional benefits of eating these humble and versatile spuds. 
What
do you give someone who has everything? Traditionally, when people
speak of giving a gift, they immediately think of wrapping paper and
bows. But there’s a growing trend of a different kind of giving:
tribute and memorial gifts that honour a life. Increasingly, they are
making an impact on the work of the QEII Foundation and the health care
offered at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax. 
You
can almost hear the pulse beat of the unit that is the emergency
department team. It’s a clinical team that assesses, treats, moves
patients along to beds or admissions, or sends them home. Patient flow
– the movement of patients through the system – had slowed and, at
times, stopped; the sight of patients on hallway stretchers and lineups
in the waiting room was common. The QEII emergency department needed
help. 
Atlantic Canada’s wide-open spaces and small, close-knit communities
are part of what gives the region its charm, but that geography has
made access to health care a challenge for some residents. That’s why
doctors and patients across Atlantic Canada are embracing telehealth,
the practice of remote diagnosis, treatment and follow-up using
telecommunications technology. 
Hearing loss ranges from slight to profound, with slight problems
manifesting as having trouble hearing during a noisy party. Someone
with moderate loss can hear sounds that are one to two metres away but
has trouble when there’s background noise. This is usually the point at
which audiologists recommend hearing aids. 
The
angel on Jackie Lowe’s right shoulder is smaller than the palm of her
hand. As tattoos go, it’s fairly innocuous. “I don’t usually like
tattoos,” says Jackie’s mother, Barbara Bowlin Lowe, “but I like this
one.”
Gail McNeil was ecstatic and more than a little surprised. After two decades of trying to quit smoking, she had finally beaten her addiction, without the agony of previous attempts. “I felt on top of the world, empowered. I knew I’d never smoke again.” Adopting a radically healthier lifestyle seven years ago helped McNeil, a Halifax-based tobacco-addiction programmer, kick the compulsion that cold turkey and aversion methods had failed to eradicate.
Although the word “triage,” from the French trier, means “to sort,” given the long wait times in hospital emergency rooms, it may feel like it actually means “to wait.” Anyone visiting an emergency department is assessed and triaged, which determines how quickly they’ll be seen. So how does triage work, and why do patients sometimes sit for hours before seeing a doctor? 
At 4:30 am on July 13 at the foot of the Confederation Bridge, Jessie Sheppard smeared herself with SPF 70 and petroleum jelly, for warmth and to help cope with jellyfish stings. Then she began the Northumberland Strait swim. “I was scared to death, mostly of jellyfish, but also a little scared of going near the pylons of that giant bridge, and, eventually, scared of every little piece of kelp that touched my hands. Ew!” She yelled for her crew to bring the boat nearer, to help control her anxiety. 
Welcome to the second issue of Living Healthy in Atlantic Canada. We’ve had some feedback on the first issue, most of it positive. But my gut (which I have learned to listen to very carefully) started telling me a month or so ago that we were leaning too far into the medical aspect of health. Looking over the photos for this issue, for instance, I realized that the White Coat Syndrome might be as much of a factor in the pages of this magazine as it is in real life. White coats scare people. So do hospitals. And we don’t want to scare anyone.
“From the minute I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I knew that
this would be a mental journey for me,” says Chris Ross. The normally
energetic 52-year-old tutor from St. Andrews, NB, had been monitoring a
persistent lump, and a biopsy had confirmed her suspicion.