Cooking from the heart

By Lethbridge Herald on April 24, 2025.

Christina Knaus poses with her book, Farmers Table Cookbook.

Al Beeber
Lethbridge Herald

After undergoing the implantation of a pacemaker when she was only 30 years old, Christina Knaus knows first-hand the importance of cardiac care.

Saskatchewan native Knaus, who came to Lethbridge in 2007 to study nursing at the University of Lethbridge, was working for Alberta Health Services at Chinook Regional Hospital when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and she found herself a patient there, isolated from family after surgery.

Knaus, who attended the Bringing Hearts Home fundraising gala in February, has launched an initiative to help efforts to raise $30 million to improve cardiac care services in southern Alberta.

Now living in Warner, Knaus has teamed up with the Chinook Regional Hospital Foundation to sell copies of her “Farmers Table Cookbook” with a portion of each sale going to the Bringing Hearts Home campaign.
The cookbook can be purchased online at www.thefarmerstable.shop

At the website, visitors can also make a donation to the campaign if they’d prefer.

Knaus was healthy and active when, in 2020, her life suddenly changed.

For years, she tried to push through symptoms of dizziness and fatigue, but a health scare put her in hospital where she learned her heart was failing.

She found herself in the unenviable position of being one of the youngest patients in Lethbridge to ever be implanted with a pacemaker, undergoing surgery alone thanks to the strict quarantine regimens of the pandemic. She learned after surgery that if something had gone awry, it would have been necessary for her to be transported to Calgary because CRH wasn’t equipped to handle the specialized services she would have required.

As fate would have it, her first pacemaker was faulty and Knaus had to undergo a second surgery which prompted her to become an advocate for more heart services here.

“The Farmers Table Cookbook” was written by Knauss and edited by former AHS colleague and avid cook Sherri Gallant. Knaus, in a phone interview this week, spoke glowingly of the support she received from  both Gallant and fellow AHS employee Gwen Wirth on her journey to write the book.

After Knaus and her fiance attended the gala, she wondered what she could do to help. She met with representatives of the CRH Foundation and the idea came up.

“It’s gotten a lot of traction” since, she says.

All the recipes in the cookbook are “all kind of based on that  farming/southern Alberta type of life. Sherri loves to cook so she was a great editor for it.”

The back part of the book is focused on women in agriculture and the lifestyle associated with it.
“I’m a nurse by trade but we all have a role on the farm,” says Knaus. “Based off of the women in my family, I come from a long line of people who love to  cook – both men and women. So the back of the book is called  “Pioneering Women” – it’s all about the generations that kind of came  before us and how they paved the path so that we can do what we can do  as women with careers.”

Knaus has been cooking most of her life. She started creating her own recipes and and writing them down. Those endeavours spawned the cookbook.

After attending the U of L, she got a job at AHS and spent most of her career there.

Knaus will be getting married to a long-time resident of Warner whose family has farmed there for 110 years. The couple bought part of a farm last summer and have settled there. Some of the recipes, stories and photos are reflective of their home.

Before her surgery, Knaus said doctors couldn’t figure out was wrong with her. She was tested for autoimmune diseases and no issues appeared with her heart. But after she passed out while curling in Coaldale one night, Knaus was taken by ambulance to hospital.

“My heart was doing really funky things and they had to cardiovert  me,” she recalls.

Cardioversion is a treatment using low-energy shocks to restore a regular heart rhythm. Knaus was told she needed a pacemaker but at 30, she wasn’t at an age  when they’re normally implanted. But when COVID hit, Knaus started getting sicker.

The day before CRH was shut down, Knaus got a phone call in which she was told the surgery had to be done the next day or she would have to wait until COVID restrictions ended.

She was given the option of going to Calgary or staying in Lethbridge. Knaus, whose job at the time was to manage all the COVID outbreaks in the South Zone, said she didn’t particularly want to go to Calgary because of the higher risk of COVID and that she would stay in Lethbridge.

She ended up suffering from pericarditis after the first implantation and her heart and lungs started filling up with fluid. She was taken back to surgery and Knaus found herself alone with no visitors.

She slowly started healing with the cardiac clinic here taking great care of her for the first six months.
The pacemaker had a Bluetooth connection and when she started feeling better, cardiologists could see all the changes in her heartbeat as she went golfing.

“As time went on, I kind of started to get more healthy and build up some endurance and really focused on the physio part of it.”

In December of 2023, Knaus ran a half-marathon in the San Bernardino mountains of California with her fiance and their families.

After that, “I knew I was going to be okay,” says Knaus, who runs nearly every day.

“All I needed for all those years was a pacemaker. Lethbridge just  wasn’t equipped to deal with it; they didn’t have enough cardiologists  and for some reason we have a ridiculous problem down here with heart  disease. They can’t keep up so when you’re 30 and you’re not 80 and  dying then it’s a little bit easier to manage symptoms.”

But as her health declined, “it was getting pretty scary there for awhile.”

Knaus says it would be easier to establish a care centre in Calgary  but Dr. Sayeh Zielke and the other cardiologists here are part of this community and “they’re doing their best to get it off the ground. That’s very honourable for physicians and all the nurses that work there to stick it out.”

Knaus says a lot of her young nurse friends have heart problems and she wonders if it’s an occupational hazard.

“It’s so different than what it was even 20 years ago. Stress plays a  big role in heart conditions, too.”