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Dr. Barbara Keddy: “I was pitifully ignorant about heart disease”

heart Behance I’m very pleased to share this with you, my heart sisters. It’s essentially the journal of a heart attack. The author is Dr. Barbara Keddy, a teacher of nurses, professor emerita at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and author of the book Women and Fibromyalgia* – a condition that Barbara herself has lived with for over 40 years. Barbara and I first “met” each other online when we both happened to be named recipients of the 2009 Women’s Health Hero awards from Our Bodies Ourselves of Boston that year – she representing the east coast of Canada, and me way out here on the west.

I’ve been reading her blog and quoting her wise words ever since (here, here and here, for example). And we’ve been casually emailing back and forth for four years – until one day in January, when I received a terse one-line message from her: she had just survived a heart attack.

Barbara’s experience is unique because she’d already been living with the constant pain of a debilitating chronic illness for decades. What happens when such a person gets hit with the double whammy of a serious heart attack on top of everything else? Here’s her story, in her own words: Continue reading →

Tags: "new normal", Dr. Barbara Keddy, fibromyalgia, living with heart disease, neuroplasticity, WPLongform

Comments 26 Comments
Categories Women and heart attacks

Happy 5th Heart-iversary to me!

6 May

by Carolyn Thomas

Five years ago today, I was hospitalized for a myocardial infarction – heart attack – or what my doctor referred to as the “widow maker”. (Note the gender-biased semantics here, heart sisters: docs don’t call a cardiac event caused by this fully occluded coronary artery the “widower maker”, do they?) I am, frankly, surprised to be here writing this today. For much of those past five years, I did not actually believe I would make it to this anniversary. As they say: before heart attack, every chest pain is just indigestion. Afterwards, every chest pain is another heart attack! That’s five years of being afraid every day. Such is reality.

Happy heart-iversary to me, and to all of you who are survivors, too! ♥

Tags: heart-iversary

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Categories Women and heart attacks

When heart patients meet the Black Swan

25 Apr

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

blackswan_johngould I have a little ritual as soon as I board the ferry from my island home for the one hour and 40 minute sailing over to the mainland: I make a stop at the magazine rack of the B.C. Ferries gift shop. It has something to do with both the beautifully tactile feel of a new magazine and its clear association in my brain with almost every ferry ride I’ve ever taken through our west coast Gulf Islands.

That, and a pack of Mentos . . .

During last week’s sailing to Vancouver, we had barely settled into our front row seats in the forward lounge with the Mentos and a copy of Psychology Today in hand before I was riveted by editor Kaja Perina‘s third page commentary. She writes about something called the Black Swan, a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. Continue reading →

Tags: black swan, Brooke Lea Foster, Chris Anderson, heart disease diagnosis, Kaja Perina, surviving heart attack

Comments 14 Comments
Categories Living with heart disease, Women and heart attacks

Yentl Syndrome: cardiology’s gender gap is alive and well

17 Apr

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

There’s a big fat yawning gap between heart disease diagnostic tests and resulting medical treatments – depending on whether doctors are looking at a male or a female patient lying there on the gurney. I’ve been saying this out loud ever since I came home from Mayo Clinic, where I first learned about the gender gap from Mayo cardiologists following my own heart attack misdiagnosis.

When asked if we might need to develop a new set of diagnostic/treatment protocol guidelines to specifically address this gap, Dr. Sharonne Hayes (founder of the Mayo Women’s Heart Clinic) responded:

“Part of the problem now is that the clinical practice guidelines are less likely to be applied to women compared to men.

“We know that when hospitals have systems in place to ensure they do provide care according to the guidelines, women’s outcomes improve.”

You may be wondering what it will take to put into place systems and guidelines (already used in male patients) for all patients, including women - in order to finally close that gender gap for good. Continue reading →

Tags: Dr. Bernadine Healy, Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, Dr. Sharonne Hayes, gender difference heart disease, gender gap, WPLongform, Yentl Syndrome

Comments 10 Comments
Categories Diagnosing - and misdiagnosing, Women and heart attacks

Tell me a (heart attack) story

15 Jan

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

Before the start of each shiny new year, how I love sitting down with both my current calendar and my brand new one side by side. I like flipping through both, month by month, transferring all the important birthdays, anniversaries and already-booked dates from one to the other. For the past four years, those new calendar dates have included my upcoming public speaking events as I continue to take my WomenHeart presentations on the road each year.

Besides sharing some sobering facts and figures about women’s #1 killer (for example, heart disease kills six times more women each year than breast cancer does, and in fact, more women than all forms of cancer combined), my presentations are mostly facts wrapped up as stories. Women in my heart health presentation audiences may think that they’re just listening to my dramatic story of heart attack misdiagnosis and survival, but by the time I get through with them, they’ve also learned about cardiac risk factors, research, anatomy, symptoms, treatments and prevention. Research tells us that “storytelling is a vastly powerful tool.” And here’s why. Continue reading →

Tags: communication, Dr. Stephen Liben, Dr. Uri Hasson, Jonathan Gottschall, storytelling, The Storytelling Animal

Comments 10 Comments
Categories Living with heart disease, Women and heart attacks

How can we get heart patients past the E.R. gatekeepers?

15 Nov

by Carolyn Thomas

Sometimes, people in my women’s heart health presentation audiences ask me if I’ve ever gone back to confront the physician who had misdiagnosed me with indigestion and sent me home from the E.R. – despite my textbook heart attack symptoms of chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain radiating down my left arm. No, my heart sisters, I never did. But what did happen was, I think, even more satisfyingly juicy.

Months after surviving that heart attack, and freshly fortified with Mayo Clinic cred after ‘graduating’ from their annual WomenHeart Science & Leadership training, I received an invitation to share what I’d just learned at Mayo to local docs and nurses working in Emergency Medicine. I was offered one whole hour on the agenda of their annual Staff Education Day to talk about my own fateful misdiagnosis – and how that scenario might be avoided for future female heart patients like me who present with clear cardiac symptoms but “normal” diagnostic tests. And as a patient advocate recently told physicians at a national symposium on integrated health care: