by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
In online heart disease community forums out there, it’s not uncommon for this discussion question to pop up:
“Should I be wearing some type of medical I.D. since my cardiac diagnosis?”
The answer, of course, is: YES! – unless for some insane reason you don’t want emergency responders to know about your pre-existing condition or how to contact your next of kin during a medical crisis. Continue reading “Why aren’t you wearing your medical I.D?”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
I can’t quite get over a University of Rochester study that predicted 83% of happily married women will still be alive 15 years after cardiac bypass surgery, versus only 28% of women in unhappy marriages.(1) Researchers suggest that supportive spouses may help by encouraging healthy behaviour, like increasing exercise, healthy eating or quitting smoking – critical to longterm survival from heart disease, as well as providing a powerful reason for women to “stick around so they can stay in the relationship that they like.” Researchers also cited earlier studies showing that people with lower hostility in their marriages have less of the kind of chronic inflammation that is linked to heart disease.
What about unhappily married women? Just being married is not in itself a guarantee that women will be supported by their spouses during recuperation from chronic illness. The prognosis, for women particularly, seems directly linked to marriage quality. What, for example, do you think the future holds for the cardiac health of the women who shared the following stories of their marriages?* Continue reading “When you live with a serious illness – and a bad marriage”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Cath Haywood recalls the day in 2006 when she felt a bit “under the weather”. She told her family that her arm ached. At first, she attributed the arm pain to over-enthusiastic ball throwing – she had been tossing lobs to her springer spaniel earlier that day. But on the following evening, the 49-year old former Welsh police officer again experienced what she describes as “a dreadful ache in my right arm”. She remembers thinking:
“I’ve really got to lay off throwing that ball!”
As the arm pain got worse, Cath brushed aside pleas from her husband and two sons to call an ambulance, and she went to bed. After all, as she told herself, she was fit, relatively young, had just lost 28 pounds, did not smoke, and drank only occasionally. So why bother the ambulance crew? Continue reading “Why does your arm hurt during a heart attack?”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
So a bunch of us, all heart disease survivors, were enjoying breakfast together one morning in Rochester, Minnesota. One of the women at our table looked up from her coffee and announced that, yes, even though she had survived a heart attack and subsequent open heart surgery, she didn’t really have heart disease anymore “you know, like the rest of you do.”
I looked at her and replied, in my most charitable tone:
“Honey, nobody gets invited to attend the WomenHeart Science & Leadership Symposium for Women With Heart Disease here at Mayo Clinic unless they actually have, you know, heart disease.” Continue reading “The cure myth”
Heart Sisters 