Written one month after my heart attack, June 2008:
“It isn’t the moment you are struck when you need courage, but the long uphill battle back to sanity and faith and security.” Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The wisdom of this quote strikes me every day. In hindsight, the time I spent hospitalized in the Coronary Care Unit after my heart attack four weeks ago seems like the easiest part of this adventure. I was surrounded every moment by state-of-the-art technology and highly-trained professionals whose only goal was to save my life and make me well enough to go home.
I didn’t appreciate this at the time, but later learned that my hospital has an outstanding cardiothoracic surgical, research and teaching reputation, enough that it attracts skilled cardiologists to come live in our beautiful seaside city. I was treated with compassion and respect from the moment I was admitted to Emergency after a terrifying cross-country flight from Ottawa.
But it’s only been in the weeks spent recuperating here at home since I was discharged from CCU that the full impact of this uphill path to recovery has hit me.
I’m facing a new journey now, a trek towards a ‘new normal’.
It strikes me that I must move from identifying myself as a ‘heart patient’ to being just a regular person again with countless facets of life, family, friends, work, plans – a person who just happens to have heart disease.
I must also re-learn how to trust my body again, having quite catastrophically learned that the body that’s served me so well for 58 years has somehow failed me. I must move to a place where the gnawing sense of terrifying hyper-vigilance that I now feel at every hiccup or twinge can fade away.
I have to learn how to be myself again.
© 2009 Carolyn Thomas www.myheartsisters.org
See also: The New Country Called Heart Disease
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Tags: health, surviving a heart attack, women and heart attacks
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