A Heart Away From Home (part 2)

In the second and final part of A Heart Away From Home, guest Heather Lannon explains how she landed on her PhD research question: how is home connected to the transplant journey? After promising Jamie she would do her PhD, Heather talks about what it was like to jump into her research just two months after his passing (she blames “widow brain”), the pros and cons of combining the personal and the academic, and how she became a participant in her own research study. Part two of this interview delves deeper into the caregiver experience and examines the hardships and resilience of patients who need to relocate for transplant. Don’t listen to this episode without listening to part one!  

In this episode: 

Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience. This approach challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others and treats research as a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act. A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both process and product. (Read more) 

Caregiver supports  

·       Ontario Caregivers Organization  

·       HeartLinks Transplant Support Group (Toronto General Hospital) 

The Heart Pump Blues - Written and Performed by Jamie Wilkinson