Big isn't bad; Bad is bad.

When I was a boy jams, jellies, pickles and other assorted products were made by small, family-owned producers. Today, not so much.

When Heinz announced the closure of their plant in Leamington and Free Press columnist Larry Cornies wrote an apology for big business, I decided I had had enough. Cornies wrote about "The deal we make with them [Big Business] in the free-market system."

Cornies was wrong, in my opinion, about the deals we make but he did start me thinking. I don't want to make deals with big companies. Before Heinz announced the closure of its Leamington operation, I thought of Heinz as a pretty fair company with which to do business. Now that has all changed.

The headline above the Cornies column read: Answer lies in understanding, not boycotting. Cornies tells his readers to understand the pressures facing big business, to clearly understand the issues facing departing manufacturers — rather than reflexively boycotting certain brands.

I feel these companies are breaking the free-market deal I personally have with these businesses. Cornies may not agree but he sees the world differently than I do.

I'm not exactly boycotting big brand name food products, but I try not to buy them. Think of Kraft cheese. It's O.K. but I like Brights or Thornloe better. I always try to pick up some Brights Cheese when passing through Bright, Ontario, on the way to my sister's in Wellesley. Closer to home, I buy Thornloe cheese from Angelo's Italian Bakery and Market just a short drive from my London home. The Thornloe aged chedder is wonderful. Far more flavour than the Kraft product.

As I began writing this, I began wondering just whom I was supporting. I looked into the stories attached to a couple of the companies. I learned, Brights Cheese has a history going back to 1874 when a group of dairy farmers began working together to make cheese. Brights is still a cooperatives today.

Thornloe is also owned by a farmer-owned cooperative. Five years ago a global dairy producer, Parmalat, announced it was closing what is now the Thornloe operation. A local dairy farmer led the move to save the plant. Today some 3 million litres of milk runs through the plant annually.

I looked through my fridge and checked out the kitchen pantry. No Smucker's jams and jellies in my home. Smuckers bought Bick's pickles and moved production from Dunnville, Ontario, to Ohio. I now buy pickles made by Lakeside Packing Co. Ltd. located in Harrow, Essex County, Ontario. For a treat I love to pick up some Kosher dill pickles from Moishes Kosher Foods, Montreal.

It is interesting to note that to buy the Moishes I must go to Costco. Costco may be big but it is a fair employer. They pay their staff well and offer decent benefits. Do I have anything purchased from Walmart? No, I have nothing. Big is not necessarily bad. It is bad that is bad.

The truth is Mr. Cornies, we all make our own deals with Big Business. The deal that I have struck seems to be quite different from yours.

Sadly, all too often we are not given the option of not buying from Big Business. When I moved to London, kitchen ranges were still being made in town. Today I have no choice. My stove, fridge and dishwasher all come from Mexico.

The other truth, Mr. Cornies, is that all too often we do not make any deal with Big Business. Big Business dictates the terms and we have no choice but to go along with whatever is offered.

Urban sprawl: A worldwide problem

Homes, Isle of Wight, garages at front but off to the side. Google Street Views.

Sprawl is a global problem. Cars are popular the world over. Garages forward or off to the sides of a homes are everywhere. Years ago I was in Tunisia in a town on the edge of the Sahara desert. I saw a new home under construction. The home had a very traditional look, it fit right in with the older residences, except for one thing: It had a garage forward design with the garage jutting out from the home toward the street.

The continuing sprawl that surrounds London is sad but it is not unique. It is sadly all too common everywhere.

What is sad about London, and so many other towns throughout Southwestern Ontario, is that there are spots in the world that are experimenting with solutions to sprawl. These place are not common but there are a lot of them. Sadly, I know of no examples of London developers thinking way outside the box -- be it a fancy suburban box with its garage forward or a highrise box, a filing cabinet for people.

Warning: Insulated blinds can cause damage in winter

These blinds are causing condensation problems in an Ontario home.

When my wife and I bought new blinds for our kitchen, we bought ones which trapped a pocket of insulating air when lowered. This style of blind, ours are Duette by HunterDouglas, insulate our large kitchen windows when lowered each evening.

Thick ice at bottom of window after an extremely cold night.

By insulating the windows, the temperature of the inside surfaces of the kitchen window glass is now much colder than in previous winters. This is causing condensation to form at the bottom of each window. Last night the cold dropped into record low territory. In the morning we discovered condensation had turned into thick ice at the bottom of each kitchen window.

Some of the paint has already been damaged and is flaking off. The windows are almost thirty years old and are of the older wooden variety. They are not plastic. This constant soaking threatens to rot the wood surrounding the windows, especially the wooden sills. We may need replacement windows sooner than expected.

An unintended consequence of using insulating blinds is the condensation problem.

Homes are getting to be quite complicated. According to an architect I know, modern builders and renovators are not really up to speed on the pros and cons of the newly designed and redesigned stuff they are installing in homes. Water resulting from condensation is not just a problem on cold windows but often forms unnoticed deep within walls and ceilings, according to this architect.

"Keep the heat" in has become almost a mantra but the research, backed by good science, needed to accomplish that goal is sadly lacking. You may be keeping the heat in but also trapping structure damaging moisture at the same time. In many cases, "keep the heat in" should be accompanied by the words "let the moisture out."

A disease that needs no torquing

One of the world's most beautiful spots, the Orkney Islands, is Ground Zero for MS.

When I worked at the local paper I can recall one reporter getting into a heated discussion over the torquing a story. An editor at the top of the newsroom pecking order insisted the reporter rewrite a story to give it the expected, and now demanded, impact. This pumping up of a story was called torquing.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is not a disease that needs to be torqued. Yet, this is exactly what a recent front page article in The London Free Press did. The reporter wrote:

It's a disease that strikes down adults at their prime -- and it's found Ground Zero in Canada.

Is the above true? Maybe; maybe not. There are those who would argue that the present Ground Zero, based on the latest figures, may be the Orkney Islands and the Shetland Islands off the north coast of Scotland. Studies of the island populations indicate an MS rate possibly as high as 402 per 100,000 inhabitants in the Orkney Islands. The Shetland Islands come in lower with only 295 per 100,000 but both rates are higher than Canada's reported rate of 291.

Declaring a country, especially a country as large as Canada, the global hot spot for MS is difficult. The disease is certainly all too prevalent in Canada but not uniformly so across the country. The frequency of occurrence varies across the country with folks in the Prairies suffering from MS at a rate running at about twice that of Canadians living in Quebec.

Why does the rate dip in Quebec only to rebound in Nova Scotia? Some theorize some of this may be the result of genes. The gene pool in Quebec is different that of the gene pool in Alberta.

Even the global Ground Zero for MS does not report a homogeneous rate for the small islands. According to Dr Wilson, of Edinburgh University’s Centre for Population Health Sciences, "We saw within Orkney and Shetland there were hotspots and cold spots. Some isles and parishes and villages had a much increased rate and in other parts there were hardly any residents who had it."

Damning Canada as the global Ground Zero for MS makes a good lede but a poor beginning for a story.

Modified cattle prods and the media

News stories just don't appear — dropped by the news gods into a reporter's lap. Stories are created: structured, modeled, fashioned and polished . The best new stories have both a protagonist and an antagonist and they unfold, inverted pyramid style, to a satisfying climax. With the climax told, the conclusion can be cut wherever a page editor must in order to fit the story onto the page.

News folk will tell you their report, their story, is true. The reply to this is, "So?" True is not necessarily balanced. Nor is true necessarily compete.

Today the local paper, where I worked for more than three decades, ran a story reporting that the Province of Ontario has agreed to a $32.7 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit filed by residents of two now closed institutions for people with developmental handicaps: the Southwestern Regional Centre near Cedar Springs and the Rideau Regional Centre in Smith Falls.

The article rekindles memories of a long forgotten story in reporting:

Southwestern Regional Centre made headlines in the 1980s when it was revealed cattle prods were used on some patients, which advocates termed a form of "torture."

Torture at Cedar Springs: Now there is a good news story and sitting right on the door step of The London Free Press. Cedar Springs is on the distant southwestern edge of the newspaper's circulation area. With an important bureau office in Chatham and thus a reporter stationed in the immediate area, the revelations of claimed mistreatment at the mental health facility was big news.

This is the kind of story that sells papers, but was it true? Yes, it was true. Modified cattle prods were being used on residents. Was the story complete? No, I don't believe so. I know for a fact that some staff at the Cedar Springs facility would say, "Yes. The story, as reported, was true." But others would say, "No," and argue the story, as reported, was incomplete. In the past, I've heard institute staff go so far as to call the news reports inflammatory and inaccurate.

I recall stories from that period that never made it into the paper. These stories did not mesh with the thrust of the cattle prod hell-hole stories. Let me relate a couple of the stories editors ignored.

Living in an institute like Cedar Springs was not life-enriching for many of those living there. At one point it was decided to hold a food adventure party. Foods that many of the occupants rarely, if ever, sampled would be served. Some of these foods, were kept off the menu for good reason. They posed a choking danger to those residents for whom even eating was a struggle. These residents missed out on the pleasure of enjoying many foods of various flavours, temperatures and textures. And because some residents were denied these foods, other residents on the floor were often also denied access.

For the party extra staff were assigned to monitor the residents and watch for any problems. The staff, trained to handle choking situations, found the party stressful but it was a delight for residents. The alert staff prevented residents from stuffing filling their mouths with food. Thanks to the staff's watchfulness, there were no choking incidents at the party.

Another story involved a young boy afflicted with Down syndrome. His parents had decided it would be best if their young son was institutionalized. They brought the boy to Cedar Springs for evaluation.

After running a number of tests on the child the parents were told that, as difficult as it would be, the best thing for their little boy would be to remain at home. The professionals at Cedar Springs determined that the little boy was actually quite bright. Certainly as bright as a healthy five or six year old child. This little boy was bright enough to learn from his surroundings. Put him in a facility with severely developmentally challenged individuals and the little boy would learn how to fit in at the institute. He would grow up to act like the severely developmentally challenged individuals with whom he lived.

Kept him at home, in a healthy, loving atmosphere, surrounded and supported by family, he would learn social graces. He would grow up to be a functioning individual. He would function at the level of a bright child but he would function. The little boy was not institutionalized. His parents took him home.

As for the stories about cattle prods and torture, I don't want to say too much as the closing chapter for that story is still to be written. The newspaper story reports that the announced deal still requires court approval.

I don't know all the stories and I am sure there are some horror stories. But I do know there is another side to this story. I was told that most of the workers authorized to deliver shocks were themselves shocked. It was felt that those delivering shocks should have a full understanding of the pain involved. I talked with one young woman who worked at the facility who told me she had been given a shock, a painful jolt, and she never wanted to be touched with a prod again. Never.

Yet, she delivered shocks. Why? The residents she touched with the modified cattle prod were injuring themselves by pounding their heads on the hard floor. The options for protecting these residents were to physically restrain them, to lock them away in essentially a fully padded cell, to drug them into an almost comatose state or to try and modify their behaviour through the controlled application of a short but painful jolt of electricity.

Despite the news reports of cattle prods and torture in the regional centre near Chatham, the centre had not gone rogue. A surgeon does not stab or assault a patient with a deadly weapon, despite the use of  sharp blades. Mental health professionals are not engaged in torture despite the use of modified cattle prods.

Matthew Israel, the inventor of the Graduated Electronic Decelerator (DEG) used at the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) in Canton, Massachusetts — and only at the JRC — defended his use of painful electrical jolts to control behaviour:

Some individuals who are developmentally disabled or psychiatrically challenged display severe behavior problems such as eye-gouging to the point of blindness, skin gouging to the point of fatal blood and bone infection, biting off the tips of one’s fingers, pulling out one’s own teeth, etc. These problems require rapid and effective treatment.

Boston Magazine in an article, The Shocking Truth, looked at the use of the DEG at the JRC in Massachusetts. The reporter wrote: "Spend enough time around the machine and it will test everything you know about right and wrong." In 2008, at the time the article was written, the writer wrote: "Some Massachusetts legislators who’ve filed bills this year to limit the use of the machine call it "barbaric" and the school "like Abu Ghraib"."

If you've got the time, read the Boston Magazine article by Paul Kix. The first four pages can be tough. You will believe you are reading about sanctioned torture and you might partially be right. But on page five you will encounter P. J. Biscardi.

At age three, P.J. was diagnosed with autism. One summer, while Peter [P.J.'s dad] drove the family to Cape Cod, P.J. grabbed his father’s hair and pulled it out, blood smearing the upholstery. Peter and his wife, Maureen, had to lock everything in their house in Burlington — drawers, file cabinets, anything that could be opened — so P.J., then maybe all of 10, wouldn’t destroy the place. Or kill himself. But it didn’t matter: P.J. was violent.

P.J. was violent, and P.J. was curious. One year, at a holiday meal with the extended family, P.J. sneaked into the bathroom and sipped Drano. Drano. Maureen had never yelled louder in her life. They rushed him to the hospital, where doctors announced, mercifully, that P.J. had only suffered chemical burns.

Another time, P.J. took one of Peter’s razor blades to his arms. "Hurt, hurt," he said, when Maureen saw the blood-soaked towel. P.J. was known to ram his body into the walls; you’ve never see a linebacker hit a wall with such force, Peter says. He tipped out dresser drawers, knocked over shelves of books. P.J. bit himself so much that a giant callus formed on the skin between his thumb and wrist, growing larger every time he drew fresh blood.

The Biscardis’ other children, an older sister and younger brother, never wanted their friends over. . . . The school district didn’t want P.J. The Biscardis couldn’t keep him at home. So they tried four treatment centers. At the last place, the drugs temporarily stunted P.J.’s growth. He was 12. Peter wasn’t comfortable with the level of medication, especially since the drugs didn’t seem to do much to keep the kid calm. The school’s doctor told Peter, "If you don’t increase the dose, we’re not going to keep him here."

Today, after three decades living at JRC, P. J. Biscardi's callus on his hand has long ago disappeared. After P.J. makes a visit to the family home, the house is in the same shape it was when he arrived. And no locked cabinets.

To be fair, DEG is not modified cattle prod therapy but only a cousin of the Ontario approach. In learning more about the history of what was done in Ontario, one will encounter the late O. Ivar Lovaas. This is the man often credited with being the father of cattle prod therapy.

Early in his career, Lovaas used modified cattle prods to deliver electric shocks to autistic children in an attempt to modify their behaviour. He later renounced the method and adopted the positive approaches in keeping with B.F. Skinner's theories on how to modify and reinforce behavior. Lovaas took advantage of food treats and activity rewards and ceased the application of painful punishment.

About 20 years after Lovaas distanced himself from his own modified cattle prod therapy, Anderson Cooper of CNN reported on a family who supported the jolting of their autistic son with 4500 volts. Cooper wrote about this on his blog: Parents seek shock treatment for son.

The CNN reporter told viewers that in 2006 the state of Illinois outlawed the use of electric shock treatment in group homes and community facilities. The parents of one child who could no longer be shocked sued the group home where their son lived. They hoped to force the home to bring back the modified cattle prod. Their son's life had deteriorated without the prod. The courts tossed the case out because the treatment was now illegal.

No matter where you stand on the electric shock treatment delivered in the closed Ontario centres, I believe you would have a difficult time proving the treatment was torture. You might be able to find examples of residents who were not helped by the therapy but then experts only claim success in about half the cases. And this, of course, is where it gets sticky. Shocking people who are not helped may very well injure them instead, leave them greatly distressed. I am not surprised that some former residents launched legal actions.

The big story here might NOT be the almost $33 million settlement. Nor is the big story the occasional use of modified cattle prods to modify behavior. The story might be that the Province of Ontario has closed about 16 costly facilities and yet is short of cash to assist families now forced to cope with mentally challenged sons and daughters.

I've read that each residential spot in an institute cost the government at least $100,000 a year and there were thousands and thousands of residents. As a society we seem to have shifted much of the burden of caring for these former residents from the province to the affected families. In many cases the province has foisted day to day responsibilities onto the mentally challenged themselves. Again, this isn't all bad, but it isn't all good either. Although some of the former residents have fared very poorly outside the centres, others have not only survived outside the centres but flourished. As I said, it is no big surprise that some former residents took legal action.

The practice of openly excluding the mentally challenged from society has ended, to be replaced all too often with the insidious act of quietly socially excluding this group. What some of these challenged individuals and their families face today is but another form of, forgive the word, torture.

Threads

For some of us there is nothing like a little heart problem to add spice to life. Note, it is important that the problem be little. If it is too big, it is all consuming. That's not good. The goal is NOT to be worried about dying but to feel driven to live, to savour the linked moments we call life.

If you have followed my blog, you will know that my granddaughter, an anglaise, is enrolled in a French public school. This is not a French immersion school, a school for English children whose parents want them to speak French. This is a French school for French children.

My granddaughter seems to be getting by. The school has had no complaints about her work. I believe the school is being very supportive of her efforts. Still, I worry. I feel driven to learn a little French, to chat with my granddaughter in the language she uses at school. I want the French fabric that is her school life to be frayed a little and for threads of French to find their way into her homelife, too.

To this end I have been watching French television (mostly TV5) and reading French news stories. A new world has enveloped me. The fabric of French culture is a rich weave with lots of threads loose along its edges.

Which bring me to Joe le Taxi — a song that is among the top one hundred best-selling singles of all time in France. It is also claimed to have been number one in Canada. Are you surprised? I am. Clearly, it was a big hit in Quebec. And clearly I have not been aware of the French threads that reach into Canada but get cleanly cut at the Quebec border.

Joe le Taxi is about a black taxi driver in Paris who knows the City of Lights very well. If it's a great little bar you seek, Joe's your man. A rum drinking, saxaphone playing dude, Joe is cool on the outside with a hot passion for Latin music on the inside.

How did I find the thread that led to the discovery of this song? TV5 and a story about Vanessa Paradis. This French singer-model-actress had a fourteen year relationship with American actor Johnny Depp. This connection makes her fodder for a news machine pumping out stories for an anglais audience.

Paradis was only fourteen when she recorded Joe. Today, in her forties, she has a fourteen year old daughter of her own, Lily-Rose, who is now evolving into an artist. Her daughter already shares a writing credit with mom and another woman, a close family friend. Lily-Rose co-wrote Love Songs with them after coming up with the melody eight years earlier when she was only six.

Paradis is attempting to foster creativity in her children, she also has young son. Paradis is surrounding the two with creative people who will lead by inspired example. Paradis is filling her children's lives with threads — creative threads.

Life is made up of threads, billions of threads. We all follow threads. It is the way life works. These threads, an uncountable number, are interwoven into the fabric we call culture. I'm hoping this learning of French will encourage my granddaughter to follow threads which lead deep into the cultural tangle that is Canada than I have ever gone. I hope taking French will be inspirational for my developing granddaughter.

Too many Americans and Canadians wear large, thick cultural blinders. Many Yanks cannot get past the "greatest country in the world" hollow boast. Talk of anything outside the United States makes their eyes glaze over. I do not want my granddaughter to be trapped in a cultural straight jacket.

If a young Vanessa Paradis, barely a teen, singing a charming, little piece of pop music seems a fragile thread on which to anchor an interest in French culture, you'd be right. It is very fine thread. And yet, if you follow it, if you allow it to gently pique your interest, you will find your self travelling deeper and deeper into French pop culture.

You may find yourself immersed in French techno pop music experiencing songs like Vive la fete, Bananasplit, or Laurent Garnier, Flashback. I have followed those threads in the past thanks to a woman who was not a small thread but a large swath of wonderfully patterned cloth in my life: My mother.

In her eighties, cruising from channel to channel one evening, searching for something of interest on television, my mother chanced upon an open-air concert by Jean Michel Jarre recorded in Paris. She loved the concert, the music and the light show accompanying it. We followed the JMJ thread and found it led us to Charlotte Rampling, an English actress and his second wife. This new thread connected us with The Night Porter, a difficult movie from the '70s with Dirk Bogarde. Bogarde was one of my mother's favourite actors. The movie was not.

Threads: Life is composed of threads. The threads we follow lead us deep into the fabric we call life. Threads hold never ending interest. We pass threads from the old to the young, from the young to the old, and from the dying to the newborn. Look about, find a thread, follow it. Live!

Ablation for heart flutter in the U.S. and Canada

Health care is expensive. That is a given. How a society covers the cost of health care is the big question facing both Canada and the United States. The Americans, prior to Obama, essentially relied on insurance companies to solve the problem. The solution wasn't perfect but for many Americans it worked.

Unfortunately, if you were dropped by your insurance company and you were unable to replace your coverage, you were in deep trouble. If you had a preexisting condition, the very health issue for which you needed covered, you might not be able to get that coverage. And if you could not afford the insurance premiums, you went without. The result was that in the States something between 35 and 40 percent of all Americans took a pass on health care; They didn't go to the doctor, to the dentist, or the hospital and if they did go they didn't get their prescriptions filled afterwards.

Canada has taken a different tack. It is called the single payer system, I believe. It isn't socialized medicine but Yanks see it that way. Because so many more Canadians as a proportion of society have health care coverage, the demand for health care in Canada is swamping the health care system. The U.S. system isn't swamped but then almost 40 percent of Americans are being kept on the sidelines. Comparing the Canadian system to the American one is a complex problem. The results of an indepth examination of the two systems really depends upon how you approach the issue.

My take on Canadian health care is from the angle of an aging heart patient. Treating my heart disease is time consuming and expensive. Suffering from a genetic-based heart disease (ARVC), my heart muscle is being slowly converted into fibrous tissue and fat. Neither materials are found to any great extent in strong, healthy heart tissue. As the muscle breaksdown, the weakened heart expands and fails.

I have given up jogging. Asking the heart to pump a lot of blood in a short period of time stresses the heart. It expands with resulting small tears. The small tears heal with fibrous tissue and fat filling the space.

Keeping my heart rate down and keeping a lid on my blood pressure are both important. I'm losing weight to easy the burden on my heart. I'm down to 195 pounds. I take a powerful drug to depress my heart rate. I take Lipitor to keep my cholesterol in check. And I take a blood thinner, Pradaxa, to prevent blood clots forming in my poorly functioning heart.

With my condition, heart arrhythmias are common. I suffer from a heart arrhythmia known as flutter. Arrhythmias cause the blood to swirl and stagnate in the heart. In about five percent of the time, this swirling results in the formation of blood clots which then move to the brain causing a serious stroke. Blood thinner slashes the chance of this occurring.

Sometimes, my heart can runaway. When this happens my heart must be hit with a brief but intense electric shock. In California a defibrillator was used in the Sonoma Hospital emergency room to force my heart back into sinus rhythm. If my heart is not returned to sinus rhythm within about ten minutes I can suffer irreparable brain damage and, within a few more minutes, death.

To prevent this, the doctors in Canada installed an ICD in my chest. ICD stands for
implantable cardioverter defibrillator. My personal defibrillator has stopped my heart from racing and has returned it to sinus rhythm at least three times. The ICD has also acted early to correct potential runaway heart problems, stopping the events from continuing into the life threatening stage.

Oddly enough, when my heart isn't racing, it is hardly beating at all. My heart rate can drop into the thirties! This isn't good. My ICD is programed to notice this problem and at these times it acts like a pacemaker. In one three month period it was found that my ICD paced my heart 98 percent of the time.

Last Friday, a week ago, the cardiac specialists at the London Health Sciences Centre gave me a reprieve from my constant heart flutter. They performed a catheter ablation procedure on my heart. Opening a small hole in a major vein in my groin, the cardiac team threaded fine wires through the vein up into my heart. They found the bad electrical pathway in the heart and burned a path across it. Scar tissue will form and this barrier should prevent my heart from returning to flutter for sometime. Eventually the heart may find another route or another path may form as my heart continues to expand. A second procedure may be necessary.

Today, I feel much better. My heart is out of flutter. My chest feels, for the most part, relaxed. But, more to the point, I am relaxed. Living in Canada, I had to be patient as the doctors went about the task of extending my life but, in the end, I was not saddled with an impossible to pay bill. Nor did I face the possibility of being dropped by my insurance company or seeing my premiums climb into the stratosphere.

What a contrast to the situation resulting from my medical treatment received in California. There the doctors were also excellent, the hospital first rate, the equipment state of the art but the bill was unbelievable. And I do mean unbelievable. When I told my Canadian doctors that I was able to run up a bill closing in on $30,000 in less than 48 hours, they were totally amazed.

After dumping almost $30,000 in California and finding no reason for my V-tach event, my health insurer was exceedingly unhappy. I believe, if I were American, I would have been at risk of having my insurance coverage revoked. On my own, I could never have afforded the wealth of tests that eventually were needed to discover the genetic cause of my problem. I certainly could not have afforded the ICD that has saved my life a number of times. And I could not have paid for the ablation therapy I had last week.

Health care is a complex issue. The stories in the media are more entertaining than informative. I cannot speak for all areas of health care in Canada. But, I can tell you that in London, Ontario, the cardiac doctors at the LHCS are first-rate, the treatment excellent and the options offered very compete.

The LHSC will be mentioned in my will and today I make do by making annual donations to both the hospital and to the Robarts Research Institute which is connected to both the hospital and to the nearby university.