Verla Fortier
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Verla Fortier

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After a 40 year career as a nurse, and nursing professor, Verla Fortier finds that as more diseases are added to her new systemic lupus diagnosis, her fears multiply. For the first year, she stayed inside her home trying to get better, and to be the perfect patient. When this did not work, she took a sharp left turn into what trees, shrubs, and grass can do for her. When she applied what she found to her own situation, it worked. Then she found the green space research that was too good not to share.

Fortier's book, Take Back Your Outside Mindset, and its companion workbook show you that spending as little as 2 hours a week close to trees, shrubs, and grass puts you back in the driver's seat of your thoughts, emotions, life span, memory, attention, and your chronic illness.

The same year Verla was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, her life long friend, Leslie went on a three day road trip and never came back. Leslie died before Verla could share the green space research with her. Verla could not understand or accept what happened to her friend in three short days. In her recent book, OPTIMIZE YOUR HEART RATE: BALANCE YOUR MIND AND BODY IN GREEN SPACE, Verla uses two tools: resting heart rate and heart rate variability to investigate what could have caused Leslie's sudden cardiac arrest. Verla combines these tools, and her cardiac care nursing knowledge with the research on the environment to figure out what happened to Leslie after she left her home in Northern Ontario. Verla gives you examples of people who did not recognize their own heart attacks, and a script to use should the worst happen to you.
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