Month: January 2011

‘Heart Sisters’ featured in More magazine’s February issue

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 6 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥   @HeartSisters

I’m thrilled to celebrate having Heart Sisters featured in the February issue of More magazine (“Canada’s Magazine Celebrating Women Over 40”). It’s included in a Body+Mind piece called Health Bloggers You’ll Love – highlighting four Canadian women who have launched health-related blogs “not only to better themselves, but also to inspire others along the way”. Writer Sydney Loney interviewed me a few months ago for this profile – it’s great to see the magazine finally in the newsstand!  Here’s what she had to say:   Continue reading “‘Heart Sisters’ featured in More magazine’s February issue” →

Carolyn’s jargon-free, patient-friendly glossary of weird cardiology terms

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 26 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥  Heart Sisters (on Blue Sky)

Like any exclusive club, heart disease has its own jargon, understandable only by other members of the club, particularly by cardiac care providers.  For example, I remember lying in my CCU bed (that’s the Coronary Intensive Care Unit), trying to memorize the letters LAD (that’s the Left Anterior Descending, the large coronary artery whose blockage had caused my MI (myocardial infarction – in my case, the so-called ‘widowmaker’ heart attack).

To help others needing simultaneous translation of this new lingo in your own medical records, here’s a helpful list of some of the most common acronyms/terms/abbreviations you’ll likely find around the cardiac ward. 

LAST UPDATED:  June 2, 2025

♥

NOTE from CAROLYN:  This entire patient-friendly, jargon-free glossary (all 9,200+ words!) is also part of my book “A Woman’s Guide to Living with Heart Disease“ (Johns Hopkins University Press).   You can ask for it at your local library or favourite bookshop, or order it online (paperback, hardcover or e-book) at Amazon, or order it directly from my publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press (use their code HTWN to save 30% off the list price). Continue reading “Carolyn’s jargon-free, patient-friendly glossary of weird cardiology terms” →

Why we keep telling – and re-telling – our heart attack stories

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 10 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

A woman in the grocery store calls out from the neighbouring checkout line: “Hey! You’re the heart lady, right?” She continues, in what seems a much-too-loud voice, that she had been in the audience at one of my annual Cardiac Café presentations at the university. But “heart lady?” Is this really how I want to be known and recognized for the rest of my natural life?   Continue reading “Why we keep telling – and re-telling – our heart attack stories” →

We survive it – but do we ever recover from a heart attack?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 8 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥   @HeartSisters

Out of the chaos surrounding my heart attack emerged one overriding obsession: to just be normal again. I was desperate to feel like my old self, all the while feeling that nothing around me felt remotely normal any longer. I was tired of being “sick”. I wanted my old life back.

And I didn’t want to be a heart patient anymore. One day, in fact, weeks after I’d been discharged from hospital, I marched around the apartment gathering up all the get well cards and bouquets of beautiful flowers that filled each room – and trashed them all. (It didn’t work, by the way. I still had heart disease, albeit along with a tidied-up home!)

What I really wanted was some kind of guarantee that I’d recover perfectly one day very soon.  But according to psychologist Dr. Lisa Holland, promising patients living with a chronic illness that we will “recover” may simply be setting us up for a situation that’s essentially unattainable. Instead, she warns, what we can do is rebuild our lives and move forward. Continue reading “We survive it – but do we ever recover from a heart attack?” →