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Your Heart Is the Size of Your Fist
Your Heart Is the Size of Your Fist
Your Heart Is the Size of Your Fist

Your Heart Is the Size of Your Fist

A Doctor Reflects on Ten Years at a Refugee Clinic
Martina Scholtens
ISBN: 9781927366684
$22.00

An absorbing and touching read, this collection of true stories is the first book by a Canadian doctor on the topic of refugee health.

Your Heart Is the Size of Your Fist draws readers into the complicated, poignant, and often-overlooked daily happenings of a busy urban medical clinic for refugees.

An Iraqi journalist whose son has been been murdered develops post-traumatic stress disorder and mourns his loss of vocation. A Congolese woman refuses antiretroviral treatment for her new HIV diagnosis, and instead places her trust in Jesus. Two conservative Muslim Iraqi women are inadvertently exposed to pornography when a doctor uses Google Images to supplement a medical discussion. By turns humorous, distressing, and moving, these stories offer insight into the people seeking a new life while navigating poverty, language barriers, and neighbours who aren’t always friendly.

This riveting collection of true stories from Dr. Martina Scholtens is filled with hope and humour, and together make up a deeply moving portrait of how one doctor attempts to provide quality care and advocacy for patients while remaining culturally sensitive, even as she wrestles with guilt, awareness of her own privilege, the faith she was raised with, and vicarious trauma after hearing countless stories of brutality and suffering.

In the spirit of Louise Aronson and Atul Gawande, Scholtens’ writing is based on her personal experiences and explores the transformative moments in which a clinical doctor-patient relationship becomes a profound human-human connection.

More About the Book

Your Heart Is the Size of Your Fist is a pleasure from start to finish: timely and timeless, intimate and wise, compelling and informative. Scholtens offers an insider's view of doctoring, powerful stories of refugees creating new lives in North America, and a personal account of balancing motherhood, medicine, and self.

- Louise Aronson, award-winning author of A History of the Present Illness

Your Heart is the Size of Your Fist is impressive--a wonderful read but also a deft exploration of multiple current concerns, from how we care for refugees to how doctors balance their professional and personal obligations and care for themselves.

- Marcia Day Childress, PhD, Associate Professor of Medical Education, University of Virginia

"Scholtens’ memoir is a transformative exploration of a brave, young doctor from a stable, nurtured environment coming of age in a healthcare system unprepared for this growing and struggling underprivileged group who arrive on Canada’s doorstep with so little in the way of material assets yet so rich in experiences. Skillfully through story, she portrays challenges refugees face when adapting to life in BC and her own frustration with how little she believes she helps them. The reader witnesses her discovery and reaction to stories of wounded survivors, from worlds she can barely conceive. Her loving family she portrays as saving her from delving too far into the trauma that she witnesses. Yet she struggles with the competing demands of motherhood and medicine as the two threaten to merge into one, as mother to mother she celebrates with them."

- Dr. Maureen Mayhew

Published:

September 26, 2017


Format:

Paperback / softback Trade paperback (US)


Page Count:

224


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