– posts here focus on how difficult it often is to get an accurate heart disease diagnosis in women
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Her medical nightmare started during the summer of 2008 when she was just 39 and began having terrifying heart attack symptoms. It took well over two years for this mother of three from upstate New York to finally hear a correct diagnosis. Put on your diagnostician’s cap today and consider the chilling account of her experience, told in her own words over five months. Continue reading “It wasn’t heart disease – but what was it?”
Here’s a news flash from the Prepared Patient forum of the Center For Advancing Health: your doctor is not a mind reader. And how you describe your symptoms can be just as important as what you describe. Physicians – and experienced heart patients – say you must be as detailed and descriptive as possible. For example: Continue reading “How to communicate your heart symptoms to your doctor”
“It’s definitely not your heart – it’s just acid reflux!” That was the first regrettable (and wrong) thing that the E.R. doctor said to me, despite my textbook heart attack symptoms of crushing chest pain, sweating, nausea, and pain radiating down my left arm. When I raised the topic of stupid comments on Inspire’s WomenHeart online community, cardiac survivors jumped right in.
These women were all too happy to share some of the real-life comments that physicians have actually said out loud to them. Most of these dismissive comments were made shortly before these patients subsequently had to undergo life-saving cardiac procedures. Each comment is true; the names of the physicians have not been disclosed in order to protect the stupid (a word, by the way, which I’m using here in its most charitable dictionary definition: “lacking common sense, dazed, unable to think clearly”). Here goes: Continue reading “Stupid things that doctors say to heart patients”
2010 has been quite the year here at Heart Sisters! The little blog that began in 2009 after my heart attack simply as “cardiac rehab for my brain” has now published 257 articles, attracting over 100,000 visitors. New articles arrive here about every four days, depending on my health, and I never run out of emerging news about women’s heart disease, cardiac research, heart-smart recipes or heart-related trivia to write about!
The Toronto-based magazine More interviewed me this year for a February 2011 feature about Canadian women who have launched health-related websites, and a number of essays here have also been picked up by other much larger health sites, here, here or here, for example. Hundreds of people now follow Heart Sisters on Twitter, repost my links on their Facebook sites, or subscribe directly via email to receive updates on new postings. Continue reading “Top 10 posts from Heart Sisters for 2010”
by 
Heart Sisters 