Our Parents in Crisis: Confronting Medical Errors, Ageist Doctors, and Other Healthcare Failings - Hardcover

Ann G. Sjoerdsma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0615193021 ISBN 13: 9780615193021

Publisher: Improbable Books, 2015

Synopsis

WINNER OF 2016 BEST BOOK AWARD FOR HEALTH: AGING/50+ IN 13TH ANNUAL USA BOOK NEWS CONTEST

Today's U.S. healthcare system is fragmented, error-prone, and patient-unfriendly, especially for older people, who often see multiple doctors and have multiple medical concerns. You need a survival kit, with a map and compass, in order to learn what the risks are and how to anticipate and avoid them. "Our Parents in Crisis" gives you those tools and the know-how to use them. It also tells a compelling family story that is must reading for all generations, especially the baby boomers and their loved ones.

In 2002, author Ann G. Sjoerdsma nearly lost her seriously ill, 78-year-old mother to medical inertia, missed connections, ageism, incompetence--take your pick, she says. An astute journalist and former practicing lawyer, Sjoerdsma could see that the accepted diagnosis didn't fit her mother's symptoms, even though doctors could--or would--not. Sjoerdsma intervened, challenging medical authority and taking action that resulted in saving her mother's life. The experience was transformative for both mother and daughter: It altered Ann Sjoerdsma's perceptions.

Simply because of aging--because of surviving--she realized, her mother and father, who were highly educated and intelligent physicians, had become vulnerable, and she couldn't trust the system to take good care of them. If they needed protection from healthcare errors, she had to protect them. She had to speak up. She couldn t let a physician's illogic, inaction, avoidance, bigotry, or any other failing or obfuscation within the healthcare system determine the fate of people she dearly loved.

Could you?

Sjoerdsma became a dedicated bedside advocate, representing her parents' interests in all healthcare venues and doing extensive research about medicine, diseases prevalent in older age, anatomy, physiology, and the facts of normal aging, all of which she shares in her impressive book. As her parents experienced more health crises in the ensuing 12 years--a pulmonary embolus; falls leading to hip and leg fractures; botched urological surgery; heart disease--Sjoerdsma witnessed firsthand the many ways that the U.S. healthcare system fails those it serves and how often doctors engage in ageism and what she calls No-Think.

"If a doctor ever asks you, one of your parents, or another older loved one, 'What do you expect at your age?,'" Sjoerdsma writes in the preface to her book, "ask him or her, 'What do you expect?,' and then find another doctor. Life is hard enough without having to put up with ageist nonsense from people who should know better."

"Our Parents in Crisis" is a chock-full-of-medical-information call to action to protect elders from biases and other risks in U.S. healthcare. It is also a poignant family story. Passionate, driven, assertive, and smart, Ann Sjoerdsma fought for her parents, and against her own burnout, initially with success, but later with flagging energy that led to troubling questions. She isn't perfect, but she learns from her mistakes and keeps going.

In a hospital crisis, Sjoerdsma "proceeds until apprehended," which is her family's code phrase for confidently venturing forth, and you can, too. Misdiagnoses are only one of the many hazards in the system: Patient "handoffs" get dropped; medical care lacks continuity; specialists don't communicate with each other; nosocomial (hospital-acquired)infections occur; testing is excessive, etc., etc. In "Our Parents in Crisis," Sjoerdsma prepares you to confront all of them. Her story will empower and inspire you.

About this title

About the Author

Ann Sjoerdsma has had an illustrious and diverse career as a book author, journalist, and attorney. She now blogs about medical matters on her own website.

"Our Parents in Crisis" (Improbable Books, 2015) is Sjoerdsma's second work of medical nonfiction. Her first title, "Starting with Serotonin: How a High-Rolling Father of Drug Discovery Repeatedly Beat the Odds" (Improbable Books, 2008), is a biography about her pioneering physician-scientist father, who was a founding father of clinical pharmacology. "Starting with Serotonin" received critical acclaim from journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Nature, and won several awards, including the Gold Medal for biography in the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the Gold Medal for science in the 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

A Washington, D.C. native, Sjoerdsma received her bachelor's and law degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She launched her career in Baltimore as executive director of The Women's Law Center and went on to become a staff attorney in the Domestic Law Unit of The Legal Aid Bureau of Baltimore City and to work with the Law Offices of Ralph M. Murdy, Esq., Baltimore. At the same time, she developed her journalism voice, free-lancing nationally, self-syndicated book reviews and writing theater and movie criticism, sports and law columns, feature articles, and editorials for a variety of publications, including The Baltimore Sun, for which she worked part-time as a copy editor, and The Daily Record, Baltimore's daily legal newspaper. She also wrote two plays, which were produced in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival.

Sjoerdsma left Baltimore to become the book review editor for The Virginian-Pilot, in Norfolk, Va., and eventually became an op-ed columnist as well. During her tenure, she won Va. Press Assn. awards for her book criticism. She returned to the free-lance life for five years before devoting her time exclusively to book writing. During this period, she worked as a legal editor for a prominent Washington, D.C.-based law journal and as a U.S. Supreme Court columnist. She also became a certified mediator.

Sjoerdsma has been a free-lance manuscript editor for Bancroft Press of Baltimore and for individual authors. Her primary titles at Bancroft were "Glory for Sale: Fans, Dollars and the New NFL," by Jon Morgan, a Baltimore Sun sports reporter; and "Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem," by Stephen Hunter, then the film critic for The Baltimore Sun.

Ann G. Sjoerdsma lives in Southern Shores, N.C. where she is active in environmental preservation and other issues of importance to the future of the Outer Banks.

Edition details

• Publisher: Improbable Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0615193021
• ISBN 13: 9780615193021
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 611