posts here focus on the “new normal” you’ll discover once you get home from hospital and the reality starts to sink in
In a recent blog post, Dr. Barbara Keddy quotes my new book in this statement: “Coping with a chronic illness is work” – an understatement coming from somebody like her.
Continue reading “Living with both fibromyalgia and heart disease”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
It’s time for physicians to stop telling patients that a diagnosis of coronary microvascular disease (MVD) is no big deal. Or alternatively, to accept that the diagnosis is real in the first place. As one of my blog readers learned to her horror, this awareness is not yet universal. When she asked her own physician, for example, if her debilitating cardiac symptoms might be due to coronary microvascular disease, he replied: “I don’t believe in microvascular disease!” – as if they’d been discussing the damned Tooth Fairy.
But here’s how Dr. Stacey Rosen, a cardiologist and spokeswoman for the American Heart Association’s Go Red For Women campaign, answered a question about microvascular disease in the New York Times recently:
Q: “I have been diagnosed with microvascular heart disease, which I was told mostly affects women and is not considered serious in and of itself. How long can it exist before it turns into serious heart disease?”
A: “MVD can lead to heart attacks, heart failure and death. It’s serious.” Continue reading “Is coronary microvascular disease serious? Is the Pope Catholic?”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
As part of my Dear Carolyn series of posts featuring my readers’ unique stories about becoming a heart patient, this one involves a plot twist that, sadly, sounds maddeningly familiar. It also involves a remarkable coincidence: a married couple who have their heart attacks eight days apart! Today’s tale focuses on one of my favourite themes in women’s heart health: being misdiagnosed with acid reflux during a heart attack, and it stars my longtime reader, Kathleen: Continue reading “Dear Carolyn: “My husband’s heart attack was treated differently than mine””
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Shortly after my heart attack, while I was lying around at home on the big red chair wondering when I was ever going to feel like my old self, my real self, my fun self, my crazy-busy self again, I went online to seek help from a cardiac support group I’d just discovered (the WomenHeart Connect online community at Inspire). All I had to do was type in the question “Does anybody else out there experience ______?” – and I knew that many of the 40,000+ other women members living with heart disease would have an answer, a handy coping tip or just some informed understanding for me.
What was happening to me? I had turned into a person I no longer recognized. That person I used to be – the one who was the last to leave any party, the one everybody else could count on, the one who thrived on juggling multiple work deadlines with ease – seemed to have disappeared. How could I get her back? Ongoing cardiac symptoms and an as-yet-undiagnosed coronary microvascular disorder meant an unrecognizable pace that I did not like one bit.
What should I be doing to speed up this annoyingly slow recovery business? I posed these questions to my online group, and among many replies, this one arrived from an anonymous sisterly soul who, like me, had been going through much the same awkward transition. A self-described recovering Type A personality, she wrote me the following: Continue reading “Life after heart attack if you’re a Type A”
Heart Sisters 