Category: Cardiology 101

posts here focus on a variety of topics all about the heart and how it works

Diagnosed with what? Brugada Syndrome?!

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 56 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Alicia Burns“A lot of people ask me how I knew something wasn’t quite right with my heart. It’s hard to answer, because I’ve suffered with palpitations and chest pain for years, but they didn’t concern any of the cardiologists I saw.”

In fact, Alicia Burns’ doctors didn’t get concerned for 14 years, despite many consultations and tests for her distressing and ongoing symptoms.

Alicia, now a 34-year old mother of five children, tells the harrowing story of the moment she first heard the words Brugada syndrome.  Continue reading “Diagnosed with what? Brugada Syndrome?!” →

Why does your arm hurt during a heart attack?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 33 Comments

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?” →

Two years spent connected to her “heart lifeline”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 2 Comments

.

Monica McFarlan was a runner, a mother of two young boys, and a very healthy 37-year-old woman when she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, associated with viral cardiomyopathy in January 2011.

For the next 3½ months, Monica was in and out of the hospital 11 times for over 45 days. By April, she and her family were told that she needed a heart transplant, and she was put on the transplant waiting list. But because her antibodies were elevated, she had to be taken off the transplant list because of the high risk that her body would reject any donor heart that was given to her. Continue reading “Two years spent connected to her “heart lifeline”” →

When routine tasks trigger heart symptoms

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 17 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

household-choresHeart disease is a strange animal indeed. Our very first symptoms can range from mild shortness of breath on exertion to sudden death – and almost every possible symptom in between.  My own were those of the textbook Hollywood Heart Attack (crushing central chest pain, nausea, sweating, and pain down my left arm) – yet I was sent home by Emergency Department staff with a misdiagnosis of indigestion – feeling very, very embarrassed for having made such a fuss over nothing.  It took two weeks to be finally correctly diagnosed with myocardial infarction (heart attack) caused by a 95% blockage of my Left Anterior Descending Coronary artery. And it took several more months – and another trip back to hospital – to figure out what was causing ongoing distressing symptoms that were ultimately diagnosed as Inoperable Coronary Microvascular Disease (MVD) or dysfunction of the smaller coronary arteries.

But MVD is very tricky to diagnose because most standard coronary artery disease diagnostic tests – the kind that work so well at  identifying big fat blockages in our larger arteries – may not be capable of catching it.  Continue reading “When routine tasks trigger heart symptoms” →