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

Just living life. No awesomeness required.

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 5 Comments

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 “Just living life. No awesomeness required.” →

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

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 41 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

dont-forget-about-me-4225379_1280I’ve written a lot (here, here, and here, for example) about cardiac pain, because I live with 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 “Pain vs. suffering: why they’re not the same for patients” →

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

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 13 Comments

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 “If you’re clueless and you know it . . .” →

A plea for the return of the classic bed jacket for patients

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 36 Comments

Hospital patients make an immediate trade that none of us want to make. The non-negotiated trade goes like this: We’ll take away (or, in some cases, cut off) your own nice clothes, toss them in this plastic sack, and in exchange, we’ll let you wear this shapeless, backless hospital gown and some goofy-looking booties while you’re here.

This is a trade designed for hospital workers, not for patients. But herein I launch my one-woman campaign to consider a revisit to the timeless yet under-appreciated garment called the bed jacket in order to combat the hideousness of those much-hated hospital gowns. Continue reading “A plea for the return of the classic bed jacket for patients” →