Stories
Healthpartners offers a speakers bureau program where volunteers come into the workplace to speak about their personal experience. Some speakers have battled disease themselves and others may have a family member or close friend who has benefited from new treatments or needed support services provided by our member organizations.
Our speakers put a human face on the fight against disease. They are able to talk about the struggles faced by real people and how they've been helped by a Healthpartners member organization.The following are stories sent to us from people across Canada.
Suzanne - The Lung Association
Lung disease is the 4th leading cause of death in Canada -
and the only one on the rise.Suzanne has been a smoker for 30 years and, like most smokers, she wants to quit. When she...
Nancy Hamill - The Canadian Cancer Society
Nancy was only 27 in 1996, when her doctor diagnosed her with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In 1997, her 11-year-old brother Michael donated his bone marrow to Nancy for a life-saving transplant. Michae...
Vincent Richer - The Arthritis Society
For Vincent Richer in 2003, increasingly morbid obesity combined with osteoarthritis had become a prison sentence, a frightening trap in which this forty three year-old, 410 pound man was barely...
Trisha Nagpal - The Canadian Liver Foundation
"It is a loss that you must bear every day. It is a loss that flashes back every morning and every night when you go to sleep… the memories don’t go away easily."
To lose a child is ...
Johnson and Kendra John - The Canadian Diabetes Association
For 41 year-old Johnson John of Ottawa, the path to good health has been an extraordinary journey.
"I became aware I was Type 1 (insulin dependent) diabetic in my mid-teens, but like so...
Ms CJ McCaffrey – Alzheimer Society of Canada
Ms CJ McCaffrey watched her mother die of Alzheimer’s disease but was reluctant to admit that she could also be suffering from the same disease—until she ended up sitting at a red light on h...
Mrs. Reta Desmarais – Canadian Diabetes Association
Many years ago, Mrs. Reta Desmarais suspected she had Type 2 Diabetes. A test ordered by her family doctor confirmed that she had diabetes—it was then she realized she had become one of two mi...
Ms Marie-Eve Chainey – The Kidney Foundation of Canada
Ms Marie-Eve Chainey was eighteen years old when she was in Spain participating in track and field competitions where she developed a blood disorder that made her kidneys stop working. Kidney fa...
Mrs. Annie Campbell – Canadian Cancer Society
Annie Campbell was unprepared when her doctor confirmed she had breast cancer in 2001. She never suspected it could happen to her. At that time, she was unaware that breast cancer is the most co...
