Podcast
Episodes
Anat Baron is a Los Angeles based tech founder and professional speaker. In this episode, Anat shares her story of supporting her mother through a diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer while living on the other side of the continent in the midst of a global pandemic. Anat reflects on the advantages and drawbacks of virtual care when trying to establish a relationship with the health care team and advocating for person-centered care.
In this episode, Mitchell Consky, a Toronto- based journalist and writer, shares the ups and downs, the joys and the struggles, of providing palliative care for his father, Harvey Consky, at home during the pandemic. These experiences inspired his book Home Safe: A Memoir Of End-of-life Care During Covid-19.
Kiersty Hong is a spiritual care practitioner at Sunnybrook. She often finds herself clarifying the role she plays on the health care team to other hospital staff and patients. Kiersty provides emotional support to any patient – regardless of their faith community or agnostic or atheist beliefs. Kiersty is here to tell us more about her work, so we can better make spiritual care a part of the interprofessional healthcare team.
Advance care planning is a process by which individuals express their healthcare preferences, values and priorities for the future. Through Advance Care Planning, individuals may identify a legally appointed Substitute decision maker. A substitute decision maker, or SDM, acts on behalf of someone when they are no longer able to make decisions for themselves. The SDMs role is to make decisions that are aligned with that individual’s previously expressed wishes. In Ontario, when a patient legally appoints a SDM this is called a Power of Attorney for personal care.
Even when an Advance Care Plan is in place, Dr Maria Muraca learned that unforeseen circumstances can come up. Maria was the Power of Attorney for her father, Michele, who died one year ago of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Maria is a family physician, as well as an advocate and teacher of advance care planning. She is here to tell us about her personal experience with her father’s changing advance care plan and how that has shaped her discussions with patients and health care workers.
In Season 2, we spoke to Andrea Warnick, a registered psychotherapist and educator on the topic of grief in children. This season we wanted to share the story of the Gerardi family. Throughout her 3 years of cancer treatments, Kasia remained open and honest with her four daughters. When Kasia learned that her cancer had metastasized to her brain and that the end of her life was near, she and her husband Ricardo worked together to make family life memorable and prepare for her death. Kasia died in December 2019. Ricardo is here today to tell us about what grief has looked like for him and for his daughters.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit everyone hard, but those living in long-term care facilities have faced unprecedented circumstances. Long-term care residents were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 in terms of illness and death. As cases multiplied, residents were isolated from the outside world. Stacey Greenberg is here today to tell us about her father who lived with Multiple Sclerosis in a long-term care facility since 2014. During the pandemic, Stacey had limited contact with her father and he was sadly isolated from his loved ones in his final days due to COVID-19 visitor and caregiver restrictions. Although he did not die of COVID-19, there were significant changes that impacted his daily life.
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