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

Innocence lost: life after a heart attack

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

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by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

Written one month after my heart attack, June 2008:
“It isn’t the moment you are struck when you need courage, but the long uphill battle back to sanity and faith and security.”    Anne Morrow Lindbergh

.The wisdom of this quote strikes me every day.  In hindsight, the time I spent hospitalized in the Coronary Care Unit after my heart attack four weeks ago seems like the easiest part of this adventure.

Back then, I was surrounded every moment by round the clock state-of-the-art technology and highly-trained professionals whose only goal was to save my life and make me well enough to go home.  Continue reading “Innocence lost: life after a heart attack” →

When you’re having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥   @HeartSisters

Lately, I’ve been nostalgically contemplating two classic books.  The first is a children’s story I used to read to my kidlets when they were little.

You may know it: Judith Viorst‘s wonderful book,  Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, in which poor little Alexander has one of those days when everything goes from very bad to much worse as the hours go by.

To this day, my now-grown children will sometimes phone me and wail:

“Mum, I’m having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day today!”

The second book I’ve been reading is Harold Kushner’s 1981 book When Bad Things Happen To Good People, which is recommended to patients and families facing death and bereavement at the Hospice where I worked since the year 2000. Rabbi Kushner wrote this book after the death of his 14-year old son. It’s a useful guide for those desperately trying to make sense out of life events that make no sense at all.

The “Why?” question can easily morph into the “Why me?” question, inviting an avalanche of self-pity, isolation, anger and depression, especially for those of us with a diagnosis of heart disease. Continue reading “When you’re having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day” →

“But you don’t look sick…”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

happy face hats

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

There have been some days when it would have been ever-so-handy if I were sporting a cast on my arm, or crutches, or a big fat neck brace. Now that would be a realistic indicator to the world ‘out there’ of how it can sometimes feel to have Coronary Microvascular Disease, a particularly debilitating form of heart disease.

But instead, every day some of us wake up, shower, get dressed in our usual clothes, comb our hair in the usual way, floss and brush just like we have always done – and go about our day, looking pretty much how we’ve always looked.

Few people ‘out there’ who don’t know us would even guess that we live with significant heart disease.  Few would guess that I’m still unable to work at the PR  job I love, for example, or that even the smallest outing with family or friends takes every bit of stamina I can muster, or that I need to nap like a pre-schooler every day just to manage the ‘new normal’ that has become my life. Continue reading ““But you don’t look sick…”” →

A letter from your heart disease

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 9 Comments

letter green door

To whom it may concern:

Congratulations! You have been selected to be the host for heart disease. You will begin to experience many or all of these symptoms — and may even deal with several of them at the same time. 

  • Pain! We are equal opportunity destroyers, therefore we will choose many places for you to experience pain. We have even devised many different types of pain, but we’ll throw in some nitroglycerin to keep your mind off the pain temporarily. We are continually improving our repertoire of pain categories, so updates are to be expected.
  • Mental confusion: This can be accompanied by embarrassment, memory loss, shortness of breath, poor co-ordination, and sensations of confusion or even shakiness. We try to simulate the experience of riding a never-ending roller coaster to satisfy your adventurous spirit. No safety harnesses required, and you have no choice of when the coaster ride starts, ends, or how fast it goes. Continue reading “A letter from your heart disease” →