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

Two years spent connected to her “heart lifeline”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 2 Comments

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Monica McFarlan was a runner, a mother of two young boys, and a very healthy 37-year-old woman when she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, associated with viral cardiomyopathy in January 2011.

For the next 3½ months, Monica was in and out of the hospital 11 times for over 45 days. By April, she and her family were told that she needed a heart transplant, and she was put on the transplant waiting list. But because her antibodies were elevated, she had to be taken off the transplant list because of the high risk that her body would reject any donor heart that was given to her. Continue reading “Two years spent connected to her “heart lifeline”” →

Things change – just more slowly than we’d like

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 15 Comments

Christopher_ColumbuChristopher Columbus on Santa Maria in 1492: painting by Emanuel Leutze, 1855

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Patience is boring and unglamorous, but a highly necessary virtue. You might not think anything is changing in life, but if you are patiently persistent, you will see change.

Consider the diary of Christopher Columbus*:

  • May 4:  On this day we sailed on.
  • May 5:  On this day we sailed on.
  • May 6:  On this day we sailed on.
  • May 7:  On this day we sailed on.
  • May 8:  Discovered land. Ate corn.”

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*  Thanks to my Toastmasters friend Teri Hustins for lending me the book Ballsy by Karen Salmansohn,  from which the Christopher Columbus example was snipped.  Image: Christopher Columbus on the Santa Maria in 1492, from a painting by Emanuel Leutze, 1855

Q:  How have you seen change happen in steps too small to appreciate at the time?

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There is no “Fair Fairy” in life

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 11 Comments

Dark Cordial PIXABAY tug of war

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

In the year 2000, I started working in the field of hospice palliative care.

That experience was more profoundly educational than any university course I’ve ever taken, any book I’ve ever read, any personal growth workshop I’ve shelled out money for.

And the biggest lessons I learned over these years stemmed from one simple truism:

“There is no ‘Fair Fairy’ in life.”    Continue reading “There is no “Fair Fairy” in life” →

Design a beautiful day today

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 10 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Martin SeligmanRegular readers will already know that I’m a fan of Dr. Martin Seligman’s work. He’s the author of Learned Optimism and a number of other books I’ve found useful, especially for those of us who have been body-slammed by a life-altering medical diagnosis and are trying to somehow salvage some shred of sense-making out of the whole mess. 

Oh, sure. You may already be thinking: it’s so easy for healthy people to feel positive. But what about when you’re a patient living with debilitating symptoms, hospital admissions, fistfuls of meds, scary side effects, diagnostic tests, medical appointments, hospital re-admissions, and distressing procedures? Don’t you need to be healthy to be truly happy? Continue reading “Design a beautiful day today” →