Tag: health

Coquitlam Express scrambling for a new training facility

The general manager of the Coquitlam Express is hoping some city councillors will reconsider their decision to deny the hockey club a temporary use permit to use a vacant warehouse space at 1750 Hartley Ave. as a gym facility.

Tali Campbell said the five councillors who voted against the team’s application to use the industrial space for up to three years may not have had a full understanding of its request.

Some of the councillors during Monday’s debate said allowing a gym in a building zoned for industrial use would set a bad precedent.

Coun. Robert Mazzarolo said the city needs to protect its dwindling industrial areas and the jobs they bring to the community.

“The activity can be accommodated in other places with appropriate zoning.”

Mayor Richard Stewart added, “If we approve a project like this, we would end up with the floodgates open.”

Couns. Asmundson and Trish Mandewo expressed concerns about limited parking at the location that had been formerly occupied by an electronics manufacturer.

Campbell said the Express organization, which now numbers 130 young players in various academy programs as well as the BC Hockey League junior team, has outgrown its current training facility in a warren of rooms in the basement of a city-owned building across the street from the Poirier Sport and Leisure Complex. He said organizations located on the second floor are also complaining about the noise.

“Everything is crammed,” Campbell said. “We make do, but we get complaints every day from our upstairs neighbours.”

Campbell said the Express spent more than eight months looking for a suitable location to move its gym facilities, and the warehouse space behind the Home Depot on United Boulevard fit the bill.

“The size was good, the price was good,” Campbell said, adding the location just down the hill from Poirier would just be a “stop-gap” until the Express can secure a permanent solution. He said the temporary gym would be used exclusively by the players, who would be bused in groups to and from their scheduled training sessions.

Coquitlam’s senior manager of economic development, Eric Kalnins, said commercial spaces suitable for a gym facility are “hard to find” in the city.

Coun., Craig Hodge, one of four councillors who supported the Express’ application, said the nature of industrial use is changing and the club does provide employment.

“It’s not industrial, but it does provide jobs and create growth,” Hodge said.

Coun. Dennis Marsden agreed.

“This is supporting a local business,” he said of the gym plan.

Campbell said changes in NCAA eligibility rules that now allow players from the Canadian Hockey League to attain scholarships to Div. 1 programs have increased competition to attract them to Junior A leagues like the BCHL. Giving players a good experience on and off the ice to continue their development is a prime consideration.

“You have to provide a state-of-the-art facility in junior hockey these days,” Campbell said. “It’s the fabric of our organization.”

In the meantime, the Express has dismantled its current training facility and players will be able to work out at a local commercial gym, OT Performance, for the next three weeks. Beyond that, though, remains uncertain, Campbell said.

“If council doesn’t reconsider, we’ll have to go back to the drawing board.”

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This Coquitlam Express player is having a career season. You’d never know he has a chronic disease

This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on March 16, 2023

If you happen to spy Coquitlam Express forward Mateo Dixon checking his phone on the players bench during a game, he’s not calling his family back in Toronto about his latest goal, or texting his buddies.

He’s checking the level of his blood sugars.

Dixon has Type 1 diabetes.

Diagnosed when he was 13 years old, Dixon says he hasn’t let the autoimmune disease hold him back from attaining his athletic goals.

In fact, having Type 1 may have even accelerated his development as a hockey player.

Now 20 and in his final season of junior hockey, Dixon is having a career year, scoring 45 points in 49 games.

Not that his journey through the sport has been easy.

When your pancreas is working as it should, you don’t think about it.

Constant calculations

The elongated gland that sits in your upper abdomen tucked behind your stomach magically produces the enzymes that help you digest food and the hormones that keep the amount of sugars in your blood on an even keel.

But when your pancreas suddenly stops functioning, you can’t not think about it.

While the days of restrictive diets for people living with diabetes are long gone, every time Dixon eats or reaches for a bottle of energy drink after a shift on the ice, he has to make a mental calculation about the amount of carbohydrates he’s ingesting.

He also has to check his blood sugar levels with an app on his phone that’s connected to a sensor plugged into his body, then determine the dose of insulin a small pump he wears 24/7 injects into his body to offset that sugar boost.

It’s not always an exact science.

Exercise, stress, anxiety and excitement can throw even the most precise calculation out of whack.

Overshoot your insulin dose and your blood sugars can drop, sapping you of energy, depleting your ability to focus or make quick decisions.

Underestimate, and your soaring blood sugars can make you nauseous and tired, and bring on a pounding headache.

Neither outcome is ideal for a high-performance athlete who has to be at the top of their game and ready at any moment to jump on the ice.

Dixon said his disease has brought on no shortage of aggravations.

“It can be so random” he said. “So many micro things can affect it.”

‘A sense of responsibility’

But, Dixon added, living with Type 1 has also put him more in tune with his body.

He said he’s hyper-aware of everything he eats and drinks and the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle to better manage his blood sugars.

Dixon’s off-ice training regimen doesn’t just get him ready for the rigours of the hockey season, it also helps smooth out the effects of the highs and lows he’ll inevitably endure.

Express coach Patrick Sexton said Dixon’s maturity is beyond his years.

“He has a sense of responsibility,” he said. “He knows exactly how he’s feeling and how to address the situation.”

Sexton said he’d played with teammates who have Type 1, like Luke Kunin, now a defenceman for the NHL’s San Jose Sharks.

But this is his first experience coaching a young athlete with the disease.

He said it’s important to maintain open lines of communication so he can understand why Dixon might not be able to immediately take a shift because he’s dealing with a low, or why he’s looking at his phone and wolfing down a candy bar on the bench instead of manning the power play on the ice.

“My job is to support him,” Sexton said.

Invisible disease

Dixon said one of biggest challenges of diabetes is its invisibility.

The advent of technology, like the small insulin pump that plugs directly into his abdomen or thigh and the digital glucose monitor that connects by Bluetooth to his smartphone, has eliminated the very public displays of pricking his finger to draw a drop of blood to dab on a test strip plugged into a handheld meter or injecting a dose of insulin with a hypodermic needle.

That can make it hard for his teammates and coaches to immediately recognize why he might be a little off his game, or why he has to cut short a workout.

So, he takes care to bring them into his world as best he can to build an understanding of his disease and the challenges it can present.

“I look at it as a growth opportunity,” Dixon said of living and competing with Type 1. “It’s not limiting at all. It can literally be the opposite.”

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Port Coquitlam defenceman plays on despite crippling, painful disease

This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on Sept. 4, 2022

Nature doesn’t just call for Justin Hill. It screams.

Last summer, the 13-year-old hockey, baseball, soccer and soon-to-be football player was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract that can cause debilitating pain and cramps, as well as sudden, urgent needs to head to the washroom.

Hill was an active young athlete hoping to land a spot as a defenceman on the Port Coquitlam Pirates A1 rep team for his age group when he started feeling pains in his stomach.

The discomfort drained his energy.

At hockey practice, Hill would have to rest for five minutes after each drill.

Sometimes, he’d have to rush from the bench to the washroom.

Instead of playing rep, he was slotted on to a house league team.

Last summer, after doctors finally figured out what was wrong, Hill was put on a liquid diet for two months. He drank up to 15 Boost shakes a day, as well as soup broths. Clear fizzy drinks like Sprite were the only treat he was allowed.

With another hockey season looming, Hill fretted about his ability to play.

“I was worried I’d have to stay at home all day and do nothing.”

But monthly infusions of medication at BC’s Children’s Hospital to suppress Hill’s abnormal immune response that triggers inflammations have helped to stabilize his condition so he can look forward to getting back on the ice.

More importantly, having a coach confide in Hill that he too suffered from a chronic bowel disease helped him cope with the mental and emotional toll of his affliction, which can often leave its sufferers feeling alone and embarrassed.

“It was nice to hear that I’m not the only one who has to run for my life to the bathroom,” Hill said. “It makes me feel like I’m not singled out.”

Hill’s mom, Melissa, said as Justin returned to his sporting activities, the family initiated discussions ahead of time with his coaches to let them know of some of the unique challenges he could face, and how they could support him.

“The biggest thing you learn as a parent is you’re the only one advocating for him,” she said.

In June, Justin received a courage award at the Port Coquitlam Hall of Fame and Sports Awards. He used the opportunity to talk publicly about his disease to help people realize how tough it can be to live with.

He said sharing his struggles helps to give him the drive to overcome them, to show he can persevere and succeed.

This summer, Hill was on the ice up to three times a day preparing for tryouts to make the Pirates U15 A1 team. This fall, he’s planning to sign up for touch football at Minnekhada Middle School where he’ll be attending Grade 8.

Hill said sports are his refuge: When he’s on the ice or the field, he’s able to park the stresses and uncertainties that come with his disease.

“Sports are the thing that make me forget,” he said. “It’s nice to have that.”

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Patient and saviour reconnect after Coquitlam Crunch heart attack

This story started when we heard about a sign affixed to some fencing alongside a popular uphill hiking trail. It first appeared in the Tri-City News on May 10, 2018.

Tanya Leibel had just witnessed evidence of humanity at its worst when she received a very personal reminder of humanity at its best.

Last month, 66-year-old Port Moody woman was in her hotel room in Krakow, Poland after visiting the Auschwitz concentration camp, where more than 1.1 million prisoners were exterminated during the Second World War, when she got an unexpected call on her cellphone.

That call would connect her to the person who had saved her life.

A year before Leibel took a bucket list tour of Europe that also included stops to see the Churchill War Rooms museum in London and Anne Frank’s home in Amsterdam, she was just another Tri-City resident hiking the Coquitlam Crunch. It was a dreary spring day and her son-in-law, Chris Langridge, had just passed her on the stairs, dialled into the music on his headphones, when she suddenly felt dizzy.

‘I knew I was in trouble’

Leibel had been climbing the Crunch’s stair section three times a week for about a year, so she was confident her fitness wasn’t flagging.

Then she felt pressure on her chest and her arm went numb.

“I knew I was in trouble,” Leibel said this week.

She called to Langridge up ahead but he couldn’t hear her because of the headphones. She waved her arms and he happened to glance back, seeing her distress.

He sprinted down to Leibel and called 911.

She sat on a rock, then passed out.

Just below them on that day, Tammy Bryant, 58, was on an exercise break from her job driving school buses for First Student Canada, chatting and solving the world’s problems with a friend, when she saw Leibel slip from her perch. The women ran up to her.

Quick action

Bryant, who just two days earlier had completed her CPR re-certification program as required by her job, leaped into action. She placed her favourite foul-weather jacket on the ground to protect Leibel from the rain-soaked earth, then began assessing her unexpected patient.

“I thought she was having a seizure,” Bryant said.

But when Langridge told her he thought his mother-in-law was having a heart attack, Bryant said she “put into motion what we had just learned.”

She applied steady, rhythmic compressions to Leibel’s chest as she hummed the Bee Gees’ disco hit “Staying Alive” because that’s what her instructors had advised.

“I had the cadence and rhythm, and that’s all I concentrated on,” Bryant said.

After about 12 minutes, first responders from Coquitlam Fire and Rescue arrived and took over. BC Ambulance paramedics arrived and applied a defibrillator twice, then loaded Leibel into their ambulance.

That was the last Bryant saw of the woman she knew only as Tanya.

Search for closure

Subsequent calls to Eagle Ridge and Royal Columbian hospitals, as well as Coquitlam RCMP, failed to turn up any information about Leibel’s fate because of privacy laws.

Bryant and her friend often chatted about that day on their subsequent hikes but they eventually became resigned to the likelihood they would never know whether Leibel had survived. They just resolved that she had lived and that was that, Bryant said, adding, “It was over and forgotten about and seldom mentioned again.”

Until this spring.

Bryant’s son and his girlfriend were halfway up the Crunch when they spied a handwritten sign affixed to some construction fencing just below Lansdowne Drive.

It read: “Did you save my life with CPR here? Please call me. Would love to thank you.”

Confusion

After she passed out on the rock, Leibel has no memory of what happened next. She was transported to RCH in New Westminster, where Dr. Albert Chan, a cardiologist, installed two stents to overcome blockages in her coronary arteries. She recovered from surgery in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Family gathered, her son flew in from Iraq, where he works in the oil fields.

“I was confused by all these people around my bed,” Leibel said.

Five or six days later, she went home, where her daughter lives in the basement suite and was able to care for her as well as take over tending to Leibel’s husband, who has dementia.

Leibel reflected on the circumstances that got her back to familiar environs, back to the embrace of her family.

“It was a master class in organization, precision and professionalism,” Leibel said. “Everyone did everything perfectly.”

When Leibel was able, she visited the fire hall to thank the Coquitlam firefighters who’d tended to her. She thanked Dr. Chan, too.

“But nobody knew who the lady was who saved me,” she said.

Filling in the blanks

Life carried on. Then, as the first anniversary of her second chance approached, Leibel reinvigorated her effort to fill in the blanks of her survival story.

She put up the sign just before embarking on her European trip because “it’s a big deal to save someone’s life.”

“It really centres you and focuses you on what’s important,” she said of her brush with mortality and the rush of circumstances that brought her back.

“Kindness has always been the ultimate gift — it has a ripple effect.”

Afraid to call

Bryant said when her son and his girlfriend told her about the sign and its location, she knew she was the person its author was seeking. But she was too afraid to make the call herself and kept putting it off.

It was her son’s girlfriend who was on the other end of the line when Leibel picked up her phone in that hotel room in Poland.

Once the details were confirmed, they arranged a connection for when Leibel returned from her trip. The patient and her rescuer met in person recently at the Tim Horton’s not far from the base of the Crunch.

“It was very emotional, overwhelming,” Leibel said.

“It’s up there with the birth of your first child,” Bryant said. “It was wonderful.”

For Leibel, her gratitude knows no bounds: Bryant not only saved her life but also spared her family the pain and heartache of her absence, she said.

For Bryant, meeting Leibel not only means the story of that day continues happily but it also confirms the importance of knowing a life-saving skill like CPR.

“I needed to know whether it worked,” she said. “I needed the affirmation. It was easy to save a life.”

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Coquitlam Rotary’s new speaker series shines a light on mental health

This story first appeared in the Tri-City News on Oct. 13, 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic may have had a silver lining, says a Coquitlam psychologist.

Denis Boyd says the public health crisis that shuttered people indoors for months at a time and created trepidation about mixing with large crowds was a big “wake-up call” to some of the everyday stresses to which we’d become complacent.

Boyd is the first presenter in Coquitlam Rotary’s new mental health speaker series that launches Oct. 29, 7 to 8:30 p.m., at Douglas College in Coquitlam. He will be speaking about the signs and causes of stress, as well as the kinds of tools that can be used effectively to manage it.

Boyd said the COVID-19 pandemic raised stress levels “a notch or five.”

He said the daily news reports of deaths and hardships brought people face-to-face with their mortality and often sparked a re-evaluation of life’s priorities.

Suddenly freed by employers to do their jobs from home, many people coped by finding a better balance between the demands of work and the opportunities of life. Cooped up, they went outdoors more to take a walk in the park, commune with their natural surroundings. They whittled their social circles down to those most important to them.

“It was sobering to have everything shut down,” Boyd said.

But as memories of those darkest days dim, old habits and routines are returning. Employers are demanding employees return to the office. Doom scrolling through social media feeds has become endemic, isolating.

Boyd said it’s important society doesn’t abandon the lessons learned through the pandemic.

“We have to always make sure we balance our work life with our personal life,” he said, adding it’s critical we constantly cultivate our relationships with others.

“The most impactful thing we can do is improve our relationships, share our journeys with each other.”

Boyd said the realities of modern living, like residing in large condo developments where getting to know your neighbours can be difficult, and the temptations of social media and video gaming as proxies to real in-person interactions can present challenges for cultivating connections.

“Our conveniences have made us more isolated,” Boyd said, adding the anxiety that comes from such isolation exacts a toll as it builds.

“When you load up and reach your capacity of stress, you’re going to get sick.”

How to attend

Admission to Coquitlam Rotary’s mental health speaker series if free, but pre-registration is required.

The second event, on Nov. 26, will feature psychologist Tamara Williams talking about the use of modern neuroscience to help caregivers and children manage emotions together. Further speakers will be announced in the new year.

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This Port Moody woman helped write the book on Zoom meeting style. Then her cat started acting weird

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote a story about a local woman who was one half of the Room Raters, a Twitter account that went viral with its witty and sometimes cutting commentary about decor and the backgrounds of Zoom and Skype interviews on TV with pundits, politicians, experts and commentators on cable and network news stations like MSNBC, CNN, FOX and ABC.
We were all feeling isolated and fearing the future. But the Room Raters brought some light to the darkness. It also brought its perpetrators a measure of internet fame and eventually a book deal.
Recently, though, I found out about an unexpected twist to their story.

A Port Moody author is crediting her cat with possibly saving her life.

Jessie Bahrey says the insistent cuddling and kneading at her chest by her two-year old cat, Ella, helped alert her something wasn’t quite right as life events kept delaying her biennnial appointment for a mammogram. But when her left arm started to inexplicably ache she procrastinated no longer.

Sure enough, the scan showed two tumours in Bahrey’s left breast, exactly where Ella had been “making biscuits.”

Bahrey said she has no history of breast cancer in her family, and her own regular self-examinations revealed nothing untoward. But when she told her doctor of Ella’s role in fuelling her concern, they expedited the biopsy that would be needed to diagnosis the nature of the tumours and plot a strategy for their treatment.

Bahrey said she was taken aback by the sudden reversal in her life that had been an unlikely whirlwind for much of the previous three years.

Pandemic phenomenon goes viral

Bahrey, who’s an office manager at a Port Coquitlam garden centre, was at the nexus of a cultural phenomenon birthed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hunkered down in her apartment just like everyone else was in the early months of the public health crisis, she and a friend based in Washington, D.C., started commenting about the decor and backgrounds they observed in Zoom and Skype interviews with celebrities, health experts, politicians and pundits on TV.

Bahrey and Claude Taylor, who runs a left-leaning Political Action Committee (PAC), started putting their commentaries online, posting their observations, criticisms and suggestions on an X account (formerly Twitter) they called Room Raters.

Bahrey and Taylor’s targets ranged from musician John Legend and former First Ladies Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as well as commentators like Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein and legal analyst Neal Katyal. Even the late Queen Elizabeth caught their attention.

Quickly, the Room Raters attracted more than 400,000 followers and sometimes their subjects quipped back, decrying a poor score, vowing to improve next time, celebrating a top rating or looking for tips to make their backgrounds look better.

The online attention led to a book deal.

When How to Zoom Your Room: Room Raters’ Ultimate Style Guide was released in June 2022, Bahrey and Taylor hit the promotion circuit, doing appearances on American and Canadian television and radio, being interviewed by the Washington Post and several podcasts.

It was, Bahrey said, “a lot of blood, sweat and tears.”

Winding down from the Room Rater whirlwind

When the hubbub died down, Bahrey went on holiday in Italy to decompress. Then her father entered hospice care and she said the impetus to schedule her mammogram appointment kept getting shuffled down her priority list. After all, she thought, she felt fine, she was running 40 kms a week and she had nothing to pique her concern.

Until feisty, aloof Ella suddenly became a cuddling comforter who always nudged her way up to Bahrey’s chest.

A 2016 study published in the veterinary medical journal, Frontiers in Veterinary Science, said dogs’ acute sense of smell can detect pathogens in humans like viruses and even cancers of the lungs, colon and breast. Some have been trained to sniff them out.

And while there’s been no formal research on the cancer-sniffing capabilities of cats, there’s no shortage of anecdotal evidence being shared on the internet.

A dour diagnosis

Bahrey said none of her doctors dismissed her story about Ella’s role in the eventual diagnosis of her triple negative breast cancer.

“It’s the bad one,” she added of the illness, referring to its predilection to grow aggressively and recur readily because the cancer cells lack estrogen or progesterone receptors and don’t make any, or very little, of a protein called HER2.

Bahrey calls 2023 her “cancer year.” She spent much of it recuperating from surgery, recovering from a super bug she caught along the way, getting radiation and chemotherapy treatment, trying to stay focused on the job of getting better.

Just before Christmas, Bahrey was able to ring the bell after her check up, the symbolic pronouncement that she was clear of cancer.

She said sometimes her mind reels at all that she’s experienced in the past few years — from the heady days of seeing her Room Rater posts retweeted by their famous subjects or referenced on national television to the dark days of uncertainty and feeling ill from the medicines that were hopefully killing her cancer.

“It was almost too much to have in my head,” Bahrey said, adding her Room Raters experience helped her weather some of those storms as people who’d received their critiques or were just fans checked in on her. One, MSNBC medical correspondent Dr. Vin Gupta, even acted as her second opinion, deciphering test results, offering his thoughts on her course of treatments.

“My sadness turned to gratitude for the relationships I’ve nurtured,” she said.

Drawing strength

Bahrey said she was able to draw strength and confidence from being interviewed by media personalities and interacting with them online to advocate for her own care.

Room Raters is now mostly in Bahrey’s past. She still touches base with Taylor, who’s taken over posting the majority of the critiques and political barbs. But Ella has become the star of her own social media posts.

“She’s a force of nature,” Bahrey said, adding since she got the all-clear from her doctors, the feline has returned to her former distant demeanour.

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