The Seated View

The City of Toronto ombudsman Fiona Crean has released two reports in two months that are highly critical of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC — the second-largest social housing provider in North America after New York) and especially critical of the President and CEO, Gene Jones. Jones is an American, known as the social housing Mr. Fix-It and was offered the job after several scandals within TCHC. Some of these included the willy-nilly eviction of vulnerable seniors (at least one of whome died as a result), a $700 million backlog of repairs, horrible conditions for many tenants, while staff were engaging in kickbacks and holding $40,000 Christmas parties . The place had to be fixed and Gene Jones was chosen to be the man to clean it out. The new Ombudsman reports focus on implementation of recommendations to protect vulnerable seniors and one released this week focuses on human resource issues . It speaks o f 80+ management staff being fired/retiring/quitting, ho...

Did you ever wonder about the blood tests for RA? My new post for HealthCentral outlines the most common RA blood tests and what the numbers mean: " RF. ESR. Anti-CCP. ANA. CPR. No, these aren’t codes used by secret agents to communicate their missions. They’re names of blood tests used in diagnosing and managing rheumatoid arthritis. When you’re new to this disease, they can seem as mysterious and impenetrable as a secret language. What do they measure? What do the numbers mean? What’s normal, what isn’t? This post is all about demystifying RA blood tests ." You can read the rest of the post here . RF. ESR. Anti-CCP. ANA. CPR. No, these aren’t codes used by secret agents to communicate their missions. They’re names of blood tests used in diagnosing and managing rheumatoid arthritis. When you’re new to this disease, they can seem as mysterious and impenetrable as a secret language. What do they measure? What do the numbers mean? What’s normal, what isn’t? This...

Today is Lucy’s Gotcha Day. Four years ago, on April 14, she came home and took over my life and I’ve loved every minute. She’s the sweetest cat I’ve ever known – in four years, she has never hissed, never swatted, never nipped. She just puts up with things. Whether it’s nail clippings, having her temperature taken at the vet, having children pay lots and lots of attention, she just takes it. Over time, I have discovered that her full name is Miss Lucinda A. Bellows. Lucinda because she is very much not a Lucille, Bellows because she purrs harder than any cat I’ve ever met, her flanks pushing in and out like a bellows in a smithy. The A? Is for anatife , barnacle in French. Which should tell you something about how much time she spends on my lap. Where she often grooms herself and would fall off, if I didn’t make sure to hold on to some part of her. Miss Lucy has many nicknames, often variations on her name (Lu, Lulu, Luce, etc.), but there are also others, more descri...

I crashed last weekend. Well, to call it simply a crash may be the understatement of the decade. Sure, this had many similarities to what happens when my body finally has had enough of being pushed beyond its limits and makes me sit still (usually while it mutters invectives): the dizzy, the exhausted, the sort of migraine, but not really, the stomach upset. But it was more intense than I ever remember it being before. It was my weekend with The Boy, which was a lucky thing for me, because it allowed me to follow what my body wanted to do without having to wait for an attendant to help me do that. Less amusing for The Boy, perhaps, when what my body wanted to do was sleep. Occasionally, it wanted to get up and try to choke down a piece of toast, but then it was back to sleep. The entire weekend, I wasn’t awake for longer than two hours at a stretch. All that sleeping helped a great deal and I felt better Monday, so I went back to work. And promptly relapsed. I learned my lesso...