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I need a nap!

23 Apr

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

I was never a napper before my heart attack. Naps, I used to believe, were only for people like my Dad, whose custom was to doze off after lunch for half an hour or so on the LaZBoy in our farmhouse. But now, I love naps! And because I live with ongoing cardiac symptoms (thanks to a subsequent diagnosis of coronary microvascular disease), I need those naps. If I skip my daily afternoon nap, I pay for it later by feeling sick and shaky.

Author/napper Toni Bernhard recently described in her wonderful Psychology Today column why naps are so important:

“Most people who are chronically ill benefit from scheduling at least one rest period into their day because it helps keep symptoms from flaring.” 

Yet paradoxically, she also notes that taking a “time out” by pausing to rest can be one of the hardest challenges that chronically ill patients face. Continue reading →

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Just living life. No awesomeness required.

5 Mar

I’m always chuffed (as my Brit friends would say) to run into an patient essay that’s so good, I wish I’d written it – one that captures the essence of what I’ve been thinking all along but somehow haven’t quite gathered those thoughts as succinctly. Although Barbara Westfall wrote this for her blog Pilgrim125 as a woman living with Stage IV breast cancer, she tells a familiar story that spoke to me as a heart patient, too.

She writes about those magical moments when we just try to live life as if we didn’t have a life-altering medical condition, thank you very much, no matter what our diagnosis. With her kind permission, I’m sharing it with you. Thank you, Barbara!

Continue reading →

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Pain vs. suffering: why they’re not the same for patients

19 Feb

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

I’ve written a lot (here, here, and here, for example) about cardiac pain, because I live with a lot of cardiac pain called refractory angina due to a pesky post-heart attack diagnosis of coronary microvascular disease. This pain varies, but it hits almost every day, sometimes several episodes per day, and it can feel very much like the symptoms I experienced while busy surviving what doctors call the widow maker heart attack in 2008.

But there’s pain, and then there’s suffering. The two are not the same.

I spent many years working in the field of hospice palliative care, where we all learned the legendary Dame Cicely Saunders‘ definition of what she called “total pain”.(1)  This is the suffering that encompasses ALL of a person’s physical, psychological, social, spiritual, and practical struggles. Although addressing total pain is an accepted component of providing good end-of-life care for the dying, the concept seems to be often ignored in cardiac care for the living. Continue reading →

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If you’re clueless and you know it . . .

12 Feb

I am clueless about many things. As in the definition: “Lacking understanding or knowledge.” As in the sentence: “I have no clue!” As in the 20+ years I spent living with a research scientist and enduring mind-numbingly torturous dinner party conversations about zinc and copper sediment in the Fraser River estuary.

That kind of clueless.
 Continue reading →

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