Latest news with #Weepers
Otago Daily Times
20-07-2025
- Health
- Otago Daily Times
Lab should be open seven days: widower
A grieving widower is vowing to continue a campaign to improve access to the Dunedin cardiac cath lab after his wife's death. Sheralyn Weepers, a te reo Māori teacher at Bayfield High School, died in 2023 on the day she was due to fly to Sydney for a life-saving heart transplant. She was 48. Her husband, Sam, said her death came a year after she had to be resuscitated at Dunedin Hospital when she had a heart attack on a Monday morning. She had been in the hospital over the weekend with heart pain but had not been treated in the catheterisation laboratory (cath lab) because her condition was not considered acute enough to call someone in at the weekend. Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora has stood by its decision not to treat Mrs Weepers in the cath lab — where treatments such as the insertion of stents and pacemakers are done — that weekend. The Weepers family, who believe the damage to her heart caused during that incident might have been avoided had she been treated at the cath lab, is now working hard to try to prevent others from having to go through the same thing. They want Dunedin Hospital to have a fulltime operational lab, instead of being closed at the weekend to all but acute cases. Mr Weepers now stands outside Dunedin Hospital at the weekends, protesting the weekend closure of the cath lab to everyone not assessed as in need of urgent care. Just because it's a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, it shouldn't matter — it should be open for anyone who needs it," he said on a recent weekend. Before she passed away, she said to me ... she wanted to make some noise about what happened here," Mr Weepers said. I'm out here really, to make sure she's remembered." He has also started a petition urging the government to fund the Dunedin Hospital to run a fulltime operational cath lab. His wife was originally diagnosed with spontaneous coronary artery dissection (Scad) in March 2012, after going to Dunedin Hospital in the evening with heart attack symptoms, Mr Weepers said. She was transferred straight to the cath lab where she received an angiogram and preventive surgery. Ten years later, on May 13, 2022 — a Friday night — Mrs Weepers went to the Dunedin Hospital at 11pm where she was diagnosed with symptoms of a heart attack", he said. It was written in her file that Mrs Weepers had Scad, but it was decided the on-call cardiologist at the time would not be called in. ... she needed care, but they would not open the lab, because it was the weekend," Mr Weepers said. He recalled being told his wife would need to wait until Monday and that she was fourth on the priority list to be seen. She stayed in hospital but had a heart attack at 2am on Monday, Mr Weepers said. She was resuscitated, transferred to ICU and later had an angiogram and curative cardiac surgery. However, her heart suffered irreparable damage" and she was diagnosed with heart failure and had a significant reduction in heart function, Mr Weepers said. She was deemed too high risk and was declined cardiac surgery in New Zealand. In May 2023, the couple flew to Adelaide for cardiac surgery; however, when there, doctors advised her she needed a full heart transplant and the plan was changed to fly to Sydney for the surgery as soon as possible. On May 15, 2023, she was due to fly to Sydney. At 2am she had an unexpected suspected ventricular fibrillation and died despite resuscitation efforts, he said. Since her death, Mrs Weepers' family have started Āwhinatia — the Sheralyn Tipene-Weepers Charitable Trust, in order to change the healthcare experience for Māori and other under-represented communities through early intervention, health education, advocacy and systemic change. Health New Zealand southern group director of operations Craig Ashton said HNZ's ongoing thoughts were with Mrs Weepers' whānau and he acknowledged the distress and impact losing a loved one had. He said HNZ had completed a thorough internal review of the case and was satisfied with the assessment and treatment provided to Mrs Weepers. We have communicated extensively with the family." He said the cath lab at Dunedin Hospital was open 24/7, during weekends and after hours. All patients are clinically assessed and have access to the cath lab for any acute or clinically urgent situations," he said.
Atlantic
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
How a Book Can Change a Graduate's Life
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. For many people in their early 20s, graduating from college is both a significant milestone—perhaps the most important of their young life—and a rupture that leaves them utterly unmoored. (It has been this way for a long time; just ask Dustin Hoffman on that pool float.) A week ago, as the class of 2025 began heading into the world, my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez wrote about times we find ourselves without direction, and the books that can help guide us out of the wilderness. She names seven that helped her through upheavals in her own life, and specifically calls out transitional moments such as weddings (or breakups), job changes, and, of course, graduations. First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic 's books section: A provocative argument about what creates serial killers Yes I will read Ulysses yes ' A Father's Prayer,' a poem by Gioncarlo Valentine Fathers don't just protect—they prepare ' Weepers,' a short story by Peter Mendelsund My own college commencement ceremony took place some years ago this week. On paper, it was the perfect celebration: I donned my cap and gown, posed for my mother's Facebook pictures, and took an exciting phone call about a full-time job. But in reality, I wasn't even graduating that day: I'd been mailed my diploma the previous December and had spent the intervening six months underemployed and sick, subsisting on meals I was still learning how to cook and bottles of Two-Buck Chuck. Perhaps because my final college years coincided with the height of the #MeToo movement, I'd been reading a lot of work by female essayists and memoirists. I was looking for someone to distill and clarify what I was experiencing as a young woman, to help me move firmly into the category of 'adult' while taking stock of all the baggage I was still carrying from my teens. I bought Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts from a feminist bookstore in Atlanta. I got Mary Karr's Lit from a books-by-the-pound store in my college town, and devoured it. I read Eula Biss, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Margo Jefferson, and Joan Didion. But the book that most defined those months and years was Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams. Jamison's essay collection alternates between measured analysis and naked emotion. Across chapters, the author takes on different roles: a medical actor, a journalist investigating a dubious diagnosis, a tourist in Nicaragua, a theorist of female suffering. In self-aware prose, she deftly avoids the labels that too often entrap women who write about their life and their feelings—self-obsessed, hysterical, histrionic. But Jamison also understands how good it feels to be melodramatic, and how warranted it can be. There's a big, bloody heart inside her sentences, and its insistent beat won my allegiance immediately and forever. At the time, I felt fragile, like my shell might crack at any moment, and between Jamison's covers I found a writer who understood that sensation. The margins of my copy, I see now, are crammed with annotations marking moments of reflection and identification. They're also full of craft notes, breaking down how Jamison deploys a phrase or a pronoun, charting allusions and noting connections between her ideas and the ones I'd encountered while earning my degree. Her book was a guiding star, not just emotionally but also professionally: It reminded me why I wanted to write and edit, and why I cared about great prose in the first place. It encouraged me to make room for my many overwhelming feelings—and then to keep moving toward the life I have today. By Xochitl Gonzalez These titles are great tools for anyone trying to navigate new opportunities, new places, or new phases of life. What to Read Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp Knapp's memoir of sobriety is just one entry in a robust genre, standing among books such as Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by Thomas De Quincey; The Night of the Gun, by David Carr; The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison; Lit, by Mary Karr; and The Basketball Diaries, by Jim Carroll. But Drinking: A Love Story was pivotal for me; I borrowed it from a sober person when I first started trying to stop. Knapp's depiction of addiction as a doomed love affair struck home. 'For a long time,' she writes, 'when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we really are.' Every book about abstinence is also, inevitably, a book about indulgence—and what lies at its bottom, eventually demanding that we go without. As Knapp puts it, 'In some ways the dynamic is this simple: alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.' Her book details the glory and devastation that precede the liberation of quitting, including the way that our excesses can subtly (or violently) affect our intimate relationships. Knapp's lushly written story illustrates the insidious way that romanticizing a dependency of any kind distorts its true impact on our lives. — Melissa Febos Out Next Week 📚 Room on the Sea: Three Novellas, by André Aciman 📚 The Girls Who Grew Big, by Leila Mottley 📚 , by Rebecca Grant Your Weekend Read The Entire Internet Is Reverting to Beta By Matteo Wong Reorienting the internet and society around imperfect and relatively untested products is not the inevitable result of scientific and technological progress—it is an active choice Silicon Valley is making, every day. That future web is one in which most people and organizations depend on AI for most tasks. This would mean an internet in which every search, set of directions, dinner recommendation, event synopsis, voicemail summary, and email is a tiny bit suspect; in which digital services that essentially worked in the 2010s are just a little bit unreliable. And while minor inconveniences for individual users may be fine, even amusing, an AI bot taking incorrect notes during a doctor visit, or generating an incorrect treatment plan, is not.
