Category: Heart disease and mental health issues

– posts here focus on the often overlooked emotional impact of having a cardiac event

Adjusting to a diagnosis you do NOT want to adjust to

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 11 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥    @HeartSisters

Like many heart patients, I began to notice that my cardiac diagnosis seemed to alter my own best-before date.  It was almost as if I’d been one person for over 50 years before being misdiagnosed and sent home in mid-heart attack, and then one morning (after flying home to the west coast from Ottawa and two more cardiac episodes on that flight)  – I somehow became a completely different person. Once home, I returned to the Emergency Department (and a different Emerg doc) where I was finally correctly diagnosed and treated.  I had presented with the same textbook symptoms that had been misdiagnosed earlier (central chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain down my left arm) – but this time a cardiologist was immediately called in. 

Turns out I wasn’t alone: the late sociology researcher Dr. Kathy Charmaz called this health-related shift in a patient’s emotional state “the loss of self“.    

For most of us, this strange new state of adjustment is temporary. Temporary, but scary.    Continue reading “Adjusting to a diagnosis you do NOT want to adjust to” →

Chronic complaining: don’t be such a “Greiner Zanner”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 22 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥  @HeartSisters

I called my favorite flower shop last week to complain.  Earlier that morning, I had picked up a bouquet of mini-gerbera flowers for our condo lobby, as I like to do each week.  The gerberas (pictured above) were advertised as seven stems for $5.99. But when I got home and unwrapped the bouquet, I counted only five. My first thought: (a) maybe miscounted by a busy florist?  My second thought: (b) maybe ALL of the displayed bouquets had only five stems, too – despite the “seven stems” advertised in this week’s flyer?  The nice lady on the phone offered me two free gerbera stems if I wanted to come back to the shop to pick them up.

“These aren’t ‘FREE’ “,  I snapped at her. “I’ve already paid you for SEVEN!”  And I did not go back.  Instead, I stewed over that interaction.     .     Continue reading “Chronic complaining: don’t be such a “Greiner Zanner”” →

Moral injury in cardiac misdiagnosis

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥  @HeartSisters

After surviving a misdiagnosed heart attack, I came home from the CCU (the intensive care unit for heart patients) feeling afraid to go to sleep at night. I felt a cold creeping dread that I would suffer another heart attack. Probably tonight. And probably fatal this time. I have since learned from many other freshly-diagnosed heart patients how remarkably common it is to be afraid to go to sleep in the the early days and weeks – if we no longer feel certain that we’ll be able to wake up.

The worst part was that even when I finally did fall asleep, I had frequent nightmares. They were always the same: having a heart attack on a plane (vividly reliving what had actually happened in real life during my last late night flight home from Ottawa to Vancouver).

But in these scary dreams, I was the only passenger on the flight. The cockpit door was open. I could see the empty seats where the Air Canada pilots should be at the controls. Just me, flying alone in an empty Boeing 787 at 40,000 feet. A terribly frightening nightmare.  Continue reading “Moral injury in cardiac misdiagnosis” →

“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. . .”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 23 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

“You must go on.   I can’t go on.   I’ll go on!”   These words are from Irish author Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel, The Unnamable”. The late Nobel Prize winner was describing a reaction that many patients may find familiar, especially when facing the shock of a new medical diagnosis on top of your existing condition.

I wrote here about how overwhelmed I felt as a heart patient (“I can’t go on!”)  with distressing new joint pain, and a diagnosis of osteoarthritis. It was too much! I simply couldn’t bear yet another painful diagnosis piled onto my already debilitating daily symptoms of a coronary microvascular disease diagnosis!

But an amazing thing happened. Continue reading ““You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. . .”” →