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Lynn Tougas Whole Heart Whole Health Registered Kinesiology and Sport

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Lynn Tougas Whole Heart Whole Health Registered Kinesiology and Sport

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“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.” ~ Michel de Montagne

From helping you regain your fitness, to building upon what you already have, to connecting you to the right specialist, to working with your current specialist, to guiding you toward the most effective evidence based health and fitness related information, we are dedicated to your whole health. Our services are suitable for all populations, including special populations and those with special needs. At Whole Heart Whole Health, our policy is to ensure you are on the right path to recovering faster, feeling better, getting stronger, moving better and moving well toward and often beyond your very best.

08/30/2026

A conservative 2nd Place🥈…
🫀
After suffering a not yet quantified heart strain back in February I was cleared in July to resume mostly Zone 2 training with some modest interval training and racing. So, I resumed business -cautiously-as usual 🏊🏼‍♀️🚴‍♀️🏃‍♀️
😬
However, last Thursday my HR jumped to 196 BPM 3xs during 3xs 400 mtr running intervals during a BRICK workout (back to back bike to run high intensity triathlon workout).
😕
I called in 🩺 and promptly had my cardiology appt bumped up while I await genetics screening for a familial variation of Marfan Syndrome/Heritable Thoracic Aneurysm Disease(HTAD). I also purchased a 6-Lead portable ECG so that I could monitor myself in the meantime.
☕️
As I had recently slipped back into my two coffee a day habit, I promptly cut back on this and I also cut back the nasal spray I had been using for my allergies as I cannot tolerate allergy medication as it had been causing other heart related symptoms last summer, along with the intermittent use of my asthma puffers.
😮‍💨
Anyway, I chose to go ahead with the Sprint Triahtlon I had been getting myself prepared for yesterday, but with a strict guideline to follow - not to push myself to the point of my heart rate catapulting into those extremely high beats like they did last week.
👏
Whereas I would not recommend any of you to follow this as medical advice, I made it mostly conservatively to the finish line of yesterday’s race and managed to squeeze into 2nd place🤪I feel the swim to bike transition may have hindered my performance the most, which makes sense because of the positional strain on the cardiovascular system from horizontal to abrupt upright and running to the bike. I speculate this is why this year’s swim to bike transition was slower/perhaps a little bit more difficult for me than previous races. The water was a 👌 ~19•C which is why I chose this event rather than other events which typically register colder/more fluctuating temperatures.
🏆
Nonetheless, got it done and am off to the🫀clinic in a few days for follow up. Will update soon on my progress while I get back to enjoying 🇨🇦’s lovely northern cottage life🌞
🤓
Stay tuned for updates…

08/18/2026

Summer ‘26 so far…

30 more days…

The worst is behind🌲🔥🥵🫀

The best is yet to come🏊🏼‍♀️🚴‍♀️🏃‍♀️

🤙

04/11/2026

🗣️ There’s a documented pattern in healthcare we need to talk about.

🧠 Research shows patient advocacy leads to:

👉 better communication
👉 better decisions
👉 better outcomes

↔️ But in practice… there’s a gap 👇

When a patient is:

• complex
• informed
• persistent
• asking system-level questions
• navigating cardiovascular + connective tissue pathology
• alone (no immediate support)
• middle-aged & female 🤨

⚠️ they often get labeled “behavioral” or “difficult”

🏥 And this tends to happen right when:

👉 complexity increases
👉 records are fragmented
👉 systems can’t integrate the picture

…so the system solves that by relabeling the patient. Efficient, right? 🙄

🗂️ Research shows:

👉 behavioral flags aren’t applied equally
👉 once added, they persist
👉 chart bias shapes future care
👉 stigma impacts outcomes

🚨 The pattern:
1. Patient advocates
2. System meets complexity
3. Chart language shifts
4. A flag appears
5. Future care inherits it

‼️ The contradiction:

👉 Don’t advocate → info gets missed
👉 Do advocate → you get labeled

📌 So no—the issue isn’t “patient behaviour.”

When data isn’t visible or integrated…

🔩 the patient becomes the adjustment variable

⸻

🫀 Final:

When subjective interpretation replaces objective history—and the patient’s voice is sidelined—

👉 risk doesn’t decrease
👉 it becomes the model

🫠 Messy. Inequitable. Unacceptable.

💰 The 🇨🇦 system can’t keep sweeping this under the rug.

Because the rug is frayed—and the model is outdated.

⸻

04/09/2026

⸻

🫀I had to dig my own aortic aneurysm records out of a buried system.

And here’s the bigger issue👇

Ontario 🇨🇦 is expanding EMRs without fixing the foundation.

🗂️ Older records are not:
• catalogued
• indexed
• searchable

📚 In a real library:
You may not access everything—but you can see it exists.

👉 In healthcare? Records disappear.
👉 Patients become invisible.
👉 Diagnoses become invisible.
👉 Continuity of care breaks.

🚨This is not a privacy inconvenience.
This is a patient safety risk.

⸻

🫀Feb 2026: suspected SCAD / aortic-related event
Underlying connective tissue disorder + known sinus of Valsalva aneurysm

But key records (2004–2014)?
👉 buried
👉 fragmented
👉 overshadowed by behavioural flags

I am still piecing this together—while recovering.

⸻

🪙My two cents:

A patient record system should work like a library:
• searchable
• indexed
• organized
• traceable across a lifetime

👉 One identifier (MRN) = find what exists.

🏥Right now, that’s not happening.

🧑‍⚕️If the system cannot be navigated by ALL—
it will continue to fail ALL.

⸻

04/05/2026

🩺I didn’t grow up with my full medical history.

🗂️I grew up with fragments.

🧑‍🧒‍🧒At adoption, each of our separate adoptive parents were given diagnoses about my brother and me—labels that were meant to explain us before we even had a chance to exist as ourselves. Those files became our “baseline”… incomplete, contextless, and defining in all the wrong ways.

What our families actually inherited wasn’t clarity—it was responsibility for a system that handed over fragments and called it enough.

And they tried—hard.

They honoured that the universe insisted on keeping us together.

They tried to understand what wasn’t fully explained—in real time.

They tried to work within systems that don’t talk to each other.

But those same systems?

👉 Fragmented us early
👉 Failed continuity
👉 Made reunion harder than it ever should have been

Reuniting with my brother wasn’t just emotional—it was systemic.

And while that process was in place…

my brother passed. 😮‍💨😢

⏰This isn’t just about delay.

💰This is about what delay costs.

🫀It’s about navigating on my own health (all the while considering my brother and our “people”):

🥼This was never just about diagnoses.

📀This was about:

➡️ missing data
➡️ disconnected systems
➡️ families navigating connective tissue disorders, bruising, and accusations of child abuse
➡️ now burdened with holding gaps they didn’t create

Families spend a lifetime trying to piece together what systems should have protected.

04/04/2026

Ontario is planning to expand the province-wide electronic medical record (EMR) system to improve data sharing across healthcare.

🧑‍🍳👩‍🍳👨‍🍳 What I see is a mess on the horizon if we continue to take a backseat—too many cooks, different recipes, no shared understanding of the dish🫠

👉 This system serves all of us—because we are ALL patients.

🤓 If it is not designed with shared usability, visibility, and accountability, it will fail us.

🆘 And most importantly—it will continue to harm patients.

⸻

On the surface, this may look like progress—but that assumption needs scrutiny.

Connectivity alone does not improve care.

🧐 Evidence shows poor usability, fragmented data, and limited interoperability lead to:

👉 clinical error
👉 inefficiency
👉 information loss

🚩 Inconsistent and poorly constructed flags across systems cause:

👉 clinical overshadowing
👉 missed diagnoses
👉 breakdowns in continuity of care

⸻

🧡 TRUTH

Right now, our EMR systems:

• Have no full-record keyword search
• Make clinical notes hard to find
• Require scrolling through visits to piece together history
• Lack true longitudinal access

This impacts decision-making.

🐘 And we are not even fully addressing the use—and misuse—of AI within these systems.

⸻

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Patient-facing tools are another gap.

🎖️ We need clear, usable patient after-visit summaries to support continuity.

🏢 Without usability and visibility, patient rights are not operational.

🫥 A connected system will not fix this.

⚖️ It will scale it. Thus, further manageable risk is inevitable.

💰Risk that we cannot continue to grow as we simply do not have the available accountability resources.

04/03/2026

Is it acting up again or is it or survival? 🧠🥀

🤓DRD2 is a neurotransmitter responsible for pleasure, reward, motivation, and motor control.

We talk about behaviour.
We label people.
We diagnose outcomes.

But we rarely ask:

What happens when someone is trying to function…
without the biological resources required to do so?

—

Food scarcity is not just hunger.

It is:
• micronutrient depletion
• impaired brain chemistry
• disrupted stress response
• altered dopamine signaling

Including pathways like DRD2—
which influence motivation, reward, and how someone shows up in the world.

—

In The Path to Phenomenal Health,
Sam Graci emphasized something simple:

Many people are not starting from disorder.
They are starting from depletion.

—

Now place that into real life.

Unstable housing.
Inconsistent meals.
Low access to nutrient-dense food.
Chronic stress.

And then ask:

Are we seeing pathology…
or physiology under strain?

—

Because when the brain doesn’t have:
• choline
• omega-3s
• B vitamins
• amino acids
• good circulation to get all nutrients to where they need to go

…then the brain cannot regulate the way we expect it to.

Not motivation.
Not mood.
Not behaviour.

—

So what do we do?

We label.

Instead of asking:

What would change
if we supported the biology first?

—

This isn’t about simplifying complex issues.

It’s about recognizing that
you cannot separate mental health from nutritional reality.

—

Maybe the question isn’t:

“What’s wrong with this person?”

But:

“What are they trying to function without?”

Therefore, it is my opinion that food be included in modern day medicine as medicine.

But, que çais je🤷‍♀️

03/24/2026

The names of the buildings change, but the patterns remain.

From my tumultuous birth and resultant prolonged stay at the Toronto Doctors Hospital located in Kensington Market — to my biological mother’s path onward to the Clarke Institute (known today as the CAMH). All while her highly sensitive baby was separated not only from her but from her brother and grandmother while she was carted off to a foster home to wait for a new forever home — never to see, feel, hear or touch her people ever again.

Toronto’s medical history is paved with stories of women silenced by ‘Security First’ and “we know what’s best” protocols.

Today, the battle continues.

Whether it’s the fight to keep a family together in the 70s or the fight for Most Responsible Physician (MRP) in 2026, the institutional gameplay is the same: Isolate, Label, and Ignore.

I’m posting this for the women who failed to ever fully thrive after being forced to give up your babies. I am writing this for the women who succumbed to the walls of what came after The Clarke — the 1980s-90s Sherbourne St post Clarke stay women’s group homes. I am also sharing this story for every patient currently enduring being ‘tucked under the institutional rug.’

The pathophysiology of the system prevails.

📝🕊️As for me, my personal related notes are being well preserved.

🎼I had a choice between grief as background music for this post or birth. I chose birth. Because whatever comes of this will be my vision moving forward. My vision starts with my severe trauma being formally recognized, accommodated for and most important realized. When the same system is dealing with a highly sensitive child’s as a mature adult — for the high stake risk of further physiological and psychological harm is far greater than what this worldly place can ever imagine.

It is time to take responsibility.

This memorial post and lamentation is dedicated to my dear birth mother Pauline(a) and her mother Myrtle. Just like you thought of us a lot, mother — I will never forget you. I only wish I could have helped you earlier😢💔

03/23/2026

First run since Feb 1🥶❄️🫀💔😮‍💨

Heart rate still jumping — not just drifting upward and too soon and at too slow a pace…so I distracted and stopped to take lots of photos including of the site of the old doctor’s hospital I was born at, the alley way near by…as well as a few other photos of 🫀s and me moving my asana🧘‍♀️on my way back up toward home.✌️

🤞This is sustainable and I continue to make progress back toward much fuller weeeks filled with all I love very soon 🏊‍♀️🚴‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏋️‍♀️

03/11/2026

⚕️ Healing thrives in systems built on continuity, trust, safety, and coordinated care.

🤕Yet no patient expects the moment when the system meant to help them heal brings their recovery journey to a full stop.

🙉Over the past few months I’ve experienced a major disruption in my health routine.

👩‍🎓 As a Registered Kinesiologist, health navigator, and lifelong endurance athlete, I approach health with science, patience, and discipline.

😶‍🌫️But even with that background, this has been the most difficult recovery journey I’ve ever faced.

Recent reality:

🤦‍♀️ Family doctor retires
🙈 Appointments constantly rescheduled
😩 Care teams struggling to communicate
⤵️ Referrals stalling
🛟 Ongoing challenges with safety, trust and communication

❤️‍🩹 Time that should be spent healing becomes time spent coordinating care.

🏆For someone whose life and profession revolve around health and performance, that lost time is deeply consequential.

🏊‍♀️🚴‍♀️🏃‍♀️ As a competitive master triathlete, I understand recovery well.
It requires structure, consistency, safety, and trust in the process.

📈When those foundations are disrupted, the impact extends far beyond a single appointment.

🏥System breakdowns affect:

🧠 Whole health
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family and social life
💼 Livelihood
💪 The ability to move forward each day with confidence

🏟️ Lately it feels appropriate to call myself “the person in the arena.”

🤝 Real progress happens when patients, clinicians, and healthcare leaders work together to strengthen the systems we all rely on to keep people safe.

Address

Toronto, ON

Opening Hours

Monday	6:30am - 6pm
Tuesday	6:30am - 6pm
Wednesday	6:30am - 6pm
Thursday	6:30am - 6pm
Friday	6:30am - 6pm

Website

http://www.wholeheartkin.com/

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