Compassion Fatigue Solutions

As I wrote in a prior post on preventive medicine, Dr Béliveau has carried out a great deal of reseach on the link between cancer and the foods we eat.

Dr Béliveau is a biochemist who works as a research scientist at two Montreal Universities. He is an expert in cancer prevention and is also a gifted communicator who aims to bring his lab findings to our dinner tables. He has written three books on cancer prevention and nutrition: Foods to Fight Cancer, Cooking with Foods that Fight Cancer and his most recently released Eating Well, Living Well: Everyday Preventive Medicine which will be available in English in the Fall of 2009.

He was interviewed by Yannick Villedieu on Radio Canada in February 2009. I had the opportunity to hear it rebroadcast last Sunday. If you speak French, I recommend you follow the links to hear this highly informative interview.

If you don't speak French and you missed my original post, I invite you to return to read it. You will find the same take-home message in the post.

(free photo from Pediant, wikicommons)

I am going to be posting off and on this summer. I will not be posting every Sunday as I have been doing for the past year and a half but rather going to "summer hours". To receive information about new posts, I invite you to subscribe (see left column of the blog). You will then receive an email notification once I post again.

I am spending most of July working half time. I am able to do this thanks to an "x over y" plan that teachers are familiar with: you save part of your monthly salary each month in order to be able to take time off later. Being self employed offers no benefits, no unemployment insurance and no job security whatsoever, but it does offer the flexibility of being able to work or not work as you decide.

So I am spending the month dealing with home improvement projects that have been lingering for years (that darned basement..., the leaky taps, the paint jobs that have been waiting, many trips to the local charity dropoff and Habitat for Humanity to get rid of all the clutter that we have accumulated, god knows how.)

I am also simply taking time to enjoy the all too brief summer we have in this part of the world. One of the things I most enjoy is to bike down to the shores of lake Ontario and go watch the windsurfers on Richardson beach. This is nearly olympic-level surfing - a very wild patch of the lake, and I love watching them fly in the air and flip themselves around. I like to pretend to myself that I too, have the upper body strength and the skill to be there with them (I don't doubt my abilities to do other things, such as run a half marathon, but I seriously doubt my capacity to windsurf on this crazy lake! But it's fun to dream...)

I hope you have some time to breathe this month, and are able to carve out a bit of time for you.