Category: Living with heart disease

posts here focus on the “new normal” you’ll discover once you get home from hospital and the reality starts to sink in

Three-quarters of unused medicines are just tossed or flushed

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 2 Comments

toilet seats

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Do you have partly-empty containers of unused or expired drugs in your medicine cabinet?  When you do your next tidy-up of this cabinet, what are you going to with these old drugs?  If you’re like most people, you flush them down the toilet so that you won’t have toxic medications lying around the house posing a danger to pets or children. Some estimates suggest that up to three-quarters of all drugs eventually get tossed this way.

Bad idea.  Continue reading “Three-quarters of unused medicines are just tossed or flushed” →

Women heart attack survivors know their place

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 7 Comments

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by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

American broadcast journalist Barbara Walters once did a story on gender roles in Kabul, Afghanistan several years before the Afghan conflict. She noted that women customarily walked five paces behind their husbands.

Years later, she later returned to Kabul and observed that women still walk behind their husbands.

From Barbara’s vantage point, the women walked even further back behind their husbands, and seemed to appear happy to maintain the old custom.

She approached one of the Afghani women and asked: “Why do you continue with an old custom that you once tried so desperately to change?”  

The woman looked Barbara straight in the eyes, and without hesitation said: 

“Land mines!”

We don’t walk five paces behind our men here in North America, but when it comes to taking care of ourselves after a catastrophic health crisis like a heart attack, we might as well be.

Continue reading “Women heart attack survivors know their place” →

How that ache may signal depression

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas

There is a disturbing link between women’s heart disease and depression.  Those suffering depression are more at risk for developing heart disease, and those diagnosed with heart disease are more at risk for suffering depression. The majority of depressed people never get help, however, partly because they don’t know that, along with emotional changes, their physical symptoms might also be caused by depression. Doctors may miss these symptoms, too:  Continue reading “How that ache may signal depression” →

A tale of two women: how we react to a heart attack diagnosis

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 1 Comment

by Carolyn Thomas

Although I’d been having increasingly debilitating cardiac symptoms for two weeks, when the cardiologist in the E.R. told me that I clearly had “significant heart disease”, I almost fell off the gurney. That diagnosis started a roller coaster of reactions in the days, weeks and months ahead: shock, disbelief, fear, denial, gratitude, anger, inspiration, despair, hope, anxiety, relief, self-pity, determination  – well, you get my drift.

Welcome to your ‘new normal’.

Dr. Charlotte Thompson, university professor at the University of California at San Diego and a practising physician for over 50 years, has had her share of observing how patients react to a devastating diagnosis. She says:

“I am always amazed at the different ways that patients respond after a serious diagnosis.”

She gives this example of  how two different women demonstrate what works – and what doesn’t: Continue reading “A tale of two women: how we react to a heart attack diagnosis” →