Hello everybody, my dear friends.
Today I want to introduce you a new friend who comes from Canada and New York.  She is Victoria Brewster, a social worker and creator of a beautiful blog, NorthernMSW. Since three monts, she usually share our post with permission and is helping to diseminate the IC-HU Project at the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean. We are in debt with Vikki.

We will talk about Vikki in the immediate future, as I will explain why.

A few days ago, Vikki published on the website of Ottíti (from France, another recommendation), a review of the recently published book from someone who all of you know: Kathy Torpie.



I would like to do a little summary  of her post:

“An amazing book and an incredible woman. Kathy Torpie went to hell and got back with a new mentality.

“Whether we welcome it or not, change is unavoidable….How we respond to change is perhaps what truly defines us in the end.”

In 1994, Kathy Torpie suffered a terrible car accident in a head-on collision with a drunk driver and suffered a very severe polytraumatism: crushed face, legs, wrists and broken ribs, perforated lungs…And she survived. She has passed sixteen surgeries and post-traumatic stress that continues twenty years later. That accident remove her face, body, spirit and safety.

And this forced Kathy to redefine her place in the world.

Imagine being his father receiving the call from the horrible accident.

Imagine being trapped in a broken body where you can’t talk, but being able to hear everything what happens around you that includes family members and professionals talking about you instead to you.


Three weeks later she was able to speak after being removed mechanical ventilation, and she could finally express her wishes. She had to start from the beginning: speaking, chewing, bowel control, and eventually walking. As babies.
In her book “Losing Face: A memour of lost identify and self-discovery”, Kathy describes her personal experience in a divided and compartimentalized health system with little coordination. She went throught a personal experience of life: dependence on others and the complaint about the need to coordinate the work and make it multidisciplinary.

Kathy is now an international speaker and psychologist, and presents her experience to healthcare professionals in lectures around the world. She uses her experience to make us aware of the experience of the patient.”

Certainly,  Kathy Torpie has managed to transform her personal experience in engine power of change, like our dear José Luis Díaz. Both stories are raised in this blog among the most visited, and their experiences have been shared in many universities and schools of Nursing and Medicine. A victory from a precarious situation. A great example.

We have much to learn from our patients, and that´s why we need to stop and listening. We need to re-connect.

From inside to outside.

Happy Thursday,
Gabi