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

Please! No more bragging about mountain climbing!

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 18 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

One of the things I love most about writing this blog is hearing directly from my readers. I already knew that Heart Sisters attracts the smartest, funniest, and wisest readers ever, of course, but this comment from Charlotte in response to one of my articles really struck a chord for me. I’ve written before about this particular issue (i.e. why trotting out all those “inspiring” survivors to talk about their amazing post-recovery achievements can actually leave me feeling not so much inspired, but inadequate). Here’s how she says it so much better (Thank you, Charlotte!):        .         . Continue reading “Please! No more bragging about mountain climbing!” →

Two big factors that can impact a patient’s loss of ‘self’

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 10 Comments

heart-VILUCA-PIXABAY-1205291_1280

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

When California sociologist Dr. Kathy Charmaz studied the subject of suffering among those living with chronic illness, she identified an element of suffering that is often overlooked by health care providers.(1)  As she explained her findings:

”    A fundamental form of that suffering is the loss of self in chronically ill persons who observe their former self-images crumbling away without the simultaneous development of equally valued new ones.

“The experiences and meanings upon which these ill persons had built former positive self-images are no longer available to them.”

Dr. Charmaz also found that this profound sense of having lost the “self” you used to be before being diagnosed is generally the result of both external and internal influences on how we view ourselves.  Continue reading “Two big factors that can impact a patient’s loss of ‘self’” →

Experiential learning: How patients go from novice to expert

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 14 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

Unlike the professionals I know in the field of cardiology (the ones who decided they really wanted to spend many, many years of their lives studying All Things Cardiac), people living with heart disease are thrust unwillingly into an intensive overnight learning immersion program. We go from being utterly ignorant to, little by little, becoming increasingly familiar with even the most complex information on the subject of our own diagnosis. As one of my Heart Sisters readers told me she had astutely reminded her physician: “This is your career, but it’s my life.”

And this seems to be true no matter what the diagnosis. I know that, had I been diagnosed with lupus instead of heart disease, I’d be blogging and speaking and writing about lupus right now.
Continue reading “Experiential learning: How patients go from novice to expert” →

More drugs, less talk for post-heart attack depression?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 13 Comments

Pill Box

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥   @HeartSisters

We know that many heart patients (like me, for example), experience some degree of situational depression immediately following a cardiac event. When we seek help, that help is far more likely to come as a prescription for an antidepressant drug rather than a referral to a professional for talk therapy. In fact, talk therapy – either by itself or in combination with medication – is actually on the decline(1) while the rate of antidepressant use has increased by almost 400% in the past two decades.(2)

This is important, because we also know from 2015 research on depression published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that, for most people, there is no statistically significant difference in effectiveness between talk therapy and taking drugs.(3) When researchers tracked treatment outcomes for those suffering from depression, they found patients responded equally to either treatment. So why hasn’t the rate of talk therapy gone up by 400%, too? Continue reading “More drugs, less talk for post-heart attack depression?” →