posts here focus on the “new normal” you’ll discover once you get home from hospital and the reality starts to sink in
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Consider the familiar pain we call brain freeze.
That’s the universal experience of feeling a sharp pain in the forehead right between your eyes after you eat or drink something that’s icy cold. But when you feel this pain, it simply means that your hypersensitive nervous system is making a mistake.
Continue reading “Brain freeze, heart disease and pain self-management”
Dearest heart sisters,
If you live with an invisible illness (as almost all heart patients do), this is your week, no matter what your diagnosis. I encourage you to visit the Invisible Illness Week site, all about those of us living with serious health conditions that nobody else can see. It’s an annual educational campaign about how often illness is utterly invisible to others, how to be sensitive to those living with these challenges, and how to learn from their unique experiences.
Continue reading “It’s Invisible Illness Awareness Week!”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
I was thinking about the freakish nature of pain the other day. I think about pain quite a bit, actually, given the frequency with which I now experience the ongoing symptoms of coronary microvascular disease. But when the first alarming warning signs of a heart attack struck out of the blue while I was out for a brisk pre-breakfast walk, the reality was not at all what I would have ever imagined a heart attack to feel like. And because I was clueless, I believed the Emergency Department physician who’d misdiagnosed me with acid reflux and sent me home that same morning. Continue reading “The freakish nature of cardiac pain”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters ♥ Heart Sisters on Blue Sky
They say that if you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t there. I do remember this about 1966, however: I spent my birthday that year in a hospital bed, where I’d been a patient for a full month recuperating from a ruptured appendix and a nasty case of peritonitis. Back then during the dawn of civilization, it was common for patients to spend far longer in hospital than we ever would now. For example:
Continue reading “The hospital discharge race: is sooner always better?”
Heart Sisters 