This Hospice Nurse Needs A Fucking Coffee Stat

After 20 years of marriage author Christopher Cudworth and his wife Linda faced a future changed by her onset of ovarian cancer at age 46. Early in their survivorship journey a former coach reached out to Chris with advice both practical and inspiration. "Your whole life has been a preparation for this." Meanwhile the women at the preschool where Linda worked rallied to support the family by forming The Girls Club, whose primary rule was simple. "We're here to help. Tell us everything that's going on." Through eight years of cancer survivorship the couple learned much about the value of character, caregiving and community. The Right Kind of Pride is a chronicle of that journey and how family, friends and faith made miracles happen along the way. The Prologue describes how the couple responded to news of cancer and formed both a practical and philosophical strategy to deal with the life-changing news. The book also features the blogs Chris and Linda distributed through an online caregiving website to a caregiving support group of more than 70 people. Each entry was written in real time and covers the real emotions of cancer survivorship from fear to faith, hope to humor. Through it all the couple strove to be a blessing to others as they were blessed, with testimony to the power of faith but also the attentuation required to make smart choices in health care situations and deal with the fact that life, and medicine itself, are not always perfect. These key philosophies emanated from the saying the couple adopted (or co-opted) as their own. "Normally the phrase 'It Is What It Is" means resignation," the author notes. "But to us it helped put cancer in its place. Linda did not choose the attitude of victimhood because our gratitude for all the help we received erased that worldview." Instead the couple enjoyed long periods of remission during 8 years of cancer survivorship while busy working, raising two children through high school and college and making time for gardening, fitness and immersion in the joys of life. The book also chronicles some of the sudden and disturbing challenges the couple faced as Chris met resistance from employers on caregiving and health insurance coverage. Yet time after time the attitude of faith and trust resolved these issues. The Right Kind of Pride focuses on the fact that humility and the willingness to show weakness and vulnerability are important facets of cancer survivorship. They present an honest take on the human condition while showing the will to do what's necessary to find peace, health and acceptance through all phases of cancer survivorship. The book carries the reader through the hope that led to miracles and the resolution of hospice and grief. The author shares his Goofball's Guide to Grief, documenting the seemingly random thoughts that come with loss and change. As author of a book titled The Genesis Fix: A Repair Manual for Faith in the Modern Age, Christopher Cudworth uses that background to relate the tangible relationship (and balance) between belief in God and the very real world of science, medicine and politics that affects us all. The Right Kind of Pride is about making sense of cancer survivorship.

A palliative care doctor on the front lines of hospital care illuminates one of the most important and controversial ethical issues of our time on his quest to transform care through the end of life. It is harder to die in this country than ever before. Statistics show that the vast majority of Americans would prefer to die at home, yet many of us spend our last days fearful and in pain in a healthcare system ruled by high-tech procedures and a philosophy to "fight disease and illness at all cost." Dr. Ira Byock, one of the foremost palliative-care physicians in the country, argues that end-of-life care is among the biggest national crises facing us today. In addressing the crisis, politics has trumped reason. Dr. Byock explains that to ensure the best possible care for those we love-and eventually ourselves- we must not only remake our healthcare system, we must also move past our cultural aversion to talking about death and acknowledge the fact of mortality once and for all. Dr. Byock describes what palliative care really is, and-with a doctor's compassion and insight-puts a human face on the issues by telling richly moving, heart-wrenching, and uplifting stories of real people during the most difficult moments in their lives. Byock takes us inside his busy, cutting-edge academic medical center to show what the best care at the end of life can look like and how doctors and nurses can profoundly shape the way families experience loss. Like books by Atul Gawande and Jerome Groopman, The Best Care Possible is a compelling meditation on medicine and ethics told through page-turning, life or death medical drama. It is passionate and timely, and it has the power to lead a new kind of national conversation.

This is your brain on Grant Petersen: Every comfortable assumption you have about a subject is turned upside down, and by the time you finish reading you feel challenged, energized, and smarter. In Just Ride—“the bible for bicycle riders” (Dave Eggers, New York Times Book Review)—Petersen debunked the bicycle racing– industrial complex and led readers back to the simple joys of getting on a bike. In Eat Bacon, Don’t Jog, Petersen upends the last 30 years of conventional health wisdom to offer a clear path to weight loss and fitness. In more than 100 short, compelling directives, Eat Bacon, Don’t Jog shows why we should drop the carbs, embrace fat, and hang up our running shoes, with the latest science to back up its claims. Diet and Exercise make up the bulk of the book, with food addressed in essays such as “Carbohydrate Primer”—and why it’s okay to eat less kale—and “You’ll Eat Less Often If You Eat More Fat.” The exercise chapters begin with “Don’t Jog” (it just makes you hungry and trains muscle to tolerate more jogging while raising stressors like cortisol) and lead to a series of interval-training exercises and a suite of kettlebell lifts that greatly enhance strength and endurance. The balance of the book explains the science of nutrition and includes more than a dozen simple and delicious carb-free recipes. Thirty years ago Grant Petersen was an oat-bran-, egg-white-, lean-meat-eating exercise fanatic who wasn’t in great shape despite all that. Today, at sixty, he is in the best shape of his life with the blood panel to prove it.

A comprehensive portrait of a uniquely American epidemic -- devastating in its findings and damning in its conclusions The opioid epidemic has been described as "one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine." But calling it a mistake is a generous rewriting of the history of greed, corruption, and indifference that pushed the US into consuming more than 80 percent of the world's opioid painkillers. Journeying through lives and communities wrecked by the epidemic, Chris McGreal reveals not only how Big Pharma hooked Americans on powerfully addictive drugs, but the corrupting of medicine and public institutions that let the opioid makers get away with it. The starting point for McGreal's deeply reported investigation is the miners promised that opioid painkillers would restore their wrecked bodies, but who became targets of "drug dealers in white coats." A few heroic physicians warned of impending disaster. But American Overdose exposes the powerful forces they were up against, including the pharmaceutical industry's coopting of the Food and Drug Administration and Congress in the drive to push painkillers -- resulting in the resurgence of heroin cartels in the American heartland. McGreal tells the story, in terms both broad and intimate, of people hit by a catastrophe they never saw coming. Years in the making, its ruinous consequences will stretch years into the future.

Daniel Miller spent 18 months undertaking an ethnographic study with the residents of an English village, tracking their use of the different social media platforms. Following his study, he argues that a focus on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram does little to explain what we post on social media. Instead, the key to understanding how people in an English village use social media is to appreciate just how ‘English’ their usage has become. He introduces the ‘Goldilocks Strategy’: how villagers use social media to calibrate precise levels of interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too cold nor too hot, but ‘just right’.

Steinbeck meets Miriam Toews in this insightful and illuminating debut about the decline of rural Canada and the meaning of community. Welcome to Fearnoch, an undistinguished Ottawa Valley farming hamlet in its twilight. The deterioration of the once fruitful way of life in this small town is explored through the lives and trajectories of its inhabitants. The narration winds into and over the characters to sow differing viewpoints on the death of the family farm, incarcerated youths, falling in love at the town dump, and the coming storm. The novel is a plea for its characters to remember humility, honesty, and to see themselves in their neighbour, before it's all gone.

4 starred reviews! Orange Is the New Black meets Walter Dean Myer’s Monster in this gritty, twisty, and haunting debut by Tiffany D. Jackson about a girl convicted of murder seeking the truth while surviving life in a group home. Mary B. Addison killed a baby. Allegedly. She didn’t say much in that first interview with detectives, and the media filled in the only blanks that mattered: a white baby had died while under the care of a churchgoing black woman and her nine-year-old daughter. The public convicted Mary and the jury made it official. But did she do it? There wasn’t a point to setting the record straight before, but now she’s got Ted—and their unborn child—to think about. When the state threatens to take her baby, Mary’s fate now lies in the hands of the one person she distrusts the most: her Momma. No one knows the real Momma. But does anyone know the real Mary?