by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Heart attack survivors often celebrate two birthdays during the year: the actual day they were born, and the fateful day they survived that heart attack. When I read Elizabeth’s reflections last month on the occasion of her 4-year heart anniversary, I asked if I could share her journey of recovery with you here.
With her kind permission, here’s what this 47-year old Virginia mother of two wrote: Continue reading
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
You’d hardly expect a physician who spends his life trying to cure cancer to suddenly shift gears and suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should “stop trying”. But it turns out that New Jersey oncologist Dr. James Salwitz agrees with a review of data published in the September 2012 issue of Lancet Oncology, entitled “First Do No Harm: Counting the Cost of Chasing Drug Efficacy.” *
An accompanying Lancet editorial suggests that during the 10 years between 2000 and 2010, “many new cancer drugs produced marginal extensions in survival and simultaneously increased risk of treatment-associated death and side effects.” This compelled Dr. Salwitz to write: Continue reading
I felt like an archeologist last week when a friend showed me a well-worn copy of a magazine article I’d written that, for some reason, he had been saving for the past 14 years. It had been published in Runner’s World back in November of 1998. As I re-read my guest column, it hit me that this was back in the publication’s heyday of iconic (male) writers like the 1968 Boston Marathon winner Amby Burfoot, and Joe Henderson, and Dr. George Sheehan, and a full decade before the magazine published its Runner’s World Complete Book of Women’s Running, and almost 20 years after I had first taken up distance running myself.
While revisiting this historical artifact I’d written, I was struck by its over-arching theme of loss. It’s a universal concept common to both heart patients mourning their loss of “normalcy” and to former distance runners mourning their loss of identity as runners. I used to be a runner, but I’m no longer a runner now. This was how I told Runner’s World readers my story of that surreal transition: Continue reading
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
As I have written here earlier:
“There are few life events more stressful, in my considered opinion, than surviving a heart attack.
“Not only is the actual cardiac event a traumatic and overwhelming experience in itself, but what very few cardiologists tell us before they boot us out the hospital door is how debilitating the day-to-day angst about every subsequent bubble and twinge can actually be. Continue reading
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Physician Dr. Robin Schoenthaler once wrote in a Boston Globe column that, instead of looking for men who like those long romantic walks on the beach at sunset, women would do well to picture how the man of your dreams handles things when you’re sick. In fact, her recommendation for ideal husband material is a man who will hold your purse in the hospital waiting room.
It can be rare to hear in person from men about what it’s really like to live with us while we’re living with heart disease. It isn’t often, for example, that our WomenHeart online support community of over 7,100 female heart patients on Inspire.com hears directly from a real live male. But when Steve Kirsche of Wethersfield, CT stopped by to write about his own perspective as the spouse of a heart patient, I asked him for permission to reprint his personal observations here for you. Here’s what Steve had to tell us: Continue reading
“There may be times when the joy you feel about survival far outweighs any anxieties you may have.
“Then, there will be times when your fears and uncertainties seem to take over your life, and you wonder if you will ever feel normal again.”
This sounds so familiar to any of us who have survived a catastrophic cardiac event, doesn’t it?
But these words were not written about heart patients – they’re for cancer survivors. Which made me wonder about this thing known as “survivorship” - a popular concept in oncology that defines a cancer survivor “from the time of diagnosis and for the balance of life.” But where, I ask you, is the concept of “survivorship” for heart patients? And why haven’t I found it yet? Continue reading
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