Every once in a while along comes a book that opens our minds to new experiences or new ways of organizing experiences and brings richness to our daily lives. Gardiner resident Puja Thomson’s My Health & Wellness Organizer: An Easy Guide to Manage your Healthcare—and Your Medical Records is such a book and a very timely one for many of us that are getting older.
This book provides you with words of advice, well organized workbook pages and many friendly suggestions. It is available in a three-hole-punched workbook ready to place into a three ring notebook, or in a bound version with three-hole-punched pages and is organized into six major sections: My Yellow Pages; Decisions, Decisions, Decisions; My Medical Appointments; Following Up After Appointments; Bills, Insurance and Legal Records; and My Reference Library—all of them designed to help you through the complexities of managing your health, your tests, and your visits to medical professionals.
Drawing on her experience dealing with doctors and other medical professionals and needing to create a support tool for herself, Puja Thomson has developed a system that organizes your office visits, your activities, and the important information that you need to have in one place so that you can retrieve it when you need it. It is also designed to help you focus on your wellness—not just your health challenges.
Building on her very successful My Hope & Focus Cancer Organizer, Puja has created a manual to help all of us with the myriad challenges of maintaining records. As she says, “Disorganization is really bad for your health; being organized can take some of the stress out.” And this book provides many ways to reduce stress:
• It encourages you to record your doctors’ addresses, phone numbers, emails, and the names of their receptionists, nurses and technicians
• It motivates you to prepare for each visit to a health professional
• It structures your recording of what the professional tells you, and
• It reminds you to write down what you need to do after each visit (something some of us may forget to do).
With this book, you will find yourself preparing differently for office and hospital visits and becoming more successful at accomplishing tasks when you return home, but the book is also a wellness organizer and includes information about “Keeping a Healthy Life Style,” “My Personal Wellness Commitments,” and “My Personal Support Team.” The focus on asking others for what you need helps expand the practice of taking care of yourself—a key aspect of wellness. The theme of the book is “Don’t go it alone” when dealing with any difficult physical ailment, disease, or other health challenge. Medical professionals used to be our case managers; currently we have to do that work, and My Health & Wellness Organizer will help you accomplish that task efficiently and effectively. Your medical professionals help you stay healthy and so can family members, friends, and others who you may not ordinarily think of as supporters. Recording who they are and how to contact them reminds you to call on them and to use their help.
The organization and tone of the book have been designed to decrease the stress involved in preparing for a doctor’s visit. Writing down what was said in the office helps you to remember the diagnosis and the recommendations. Knowing who you can call on for help— whether practical, emotional, or spiritual—makes the tasks less intimidating. And using the book provides peace of mind both by preparing you for situations that might arise unexpectedly and by helping you plan for routine medical appointments. The fact that you can get extra pages from the website also gives you more resources if you need them.
Puja Thomson, a successful author, publisher, healer, minister, and proprietor of a local bed and breakfast retreat center, has been publishing books since 1999, when self-publishing was becoming the norm; she launched Roots & Wings for Strength and Freedom under the Roots & Wings Publishing imprint. Since her career has included working in the fields of education, social work, massage, and healing, she has the background to write this book and make it useful to a wide range of persons. For more information about the book, you can contact Puja Thomson at www.rootsnwings.com.