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

Study: “91% discharged from hospital without care plan”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 23 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

When I was discharged from hospital following my heart attack, I was wheelchaired down to the front door, patted on the head, and waved off with just a follow-up appointment with a cardiologist in six weeks’ time. I carried home with me my appointment card, a prescription for a fistful of new daily cardiac medications, a one-page photocopy on post-op wound  care, a couple of pamphlets on cardiac rehab and heart-healthy eating, and a Heart and Stroke Foundation booklet called Recovery Road. But nowhere in this small stack of old growth forests was there anything about me.

Me personally.  Me, Carolyn Thomas, the shocked and frightened and overwhelmed heart attack survivor.  Continue reading “Study: “91% discharged from hospital without care plan”” →

Looking good for your doctor’s appointment

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 24 Comments

too-much-makeup_697861

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

I remember that moment very clearly. I was sitting in my kitchen, staring at the wall clock. Like many newly-diagnosed heart attack survivors, I was in the throes of what we now know was completely unexpected post-hospital discharge depression. I had a follow-up appointment with my doctor that morning, and at that moment, I was having a very hard time trying to decide whether or not I should wash my hair.

Normally, shower/hair-washing is just part of my regular daily routine – not something to be decided at all. But on this day, some part of me knew that this might be the third or even the fifth day in a row I’d gone without bothering to shower, and maybe I shouldn’t let my doctor see me like this. 

Wouldn’t want her to see how bad things had become for me. Wouldn’t want her to see me without my perfect pasted-on happy smile/make-up/clothes/hair. Continue reading “Looking good for your doctor’s appointment” →

Learning to love your open heart surgery scar

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 182 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

Scar image: Defective Heart Girl

Each surgical scar on my body tells a story.  The big long one that tracks across my lower right abdomen tells of an appendix that ruptured on my 16th birthday – and the subsequent month I spent in hospital seriously ill with peritonitis and creepy drainage tubes.  Two scars on my right knee tell of surgery after an unfortunate slide down a big pile of gravel. Another meandering zig zag tells of a nasty piece of broken glass once embedded into my left palm, its evidence exquisitely masked by the skilled plastic surgeon who sewed my hand back up.

Women who have survived open heart surgery sometimes have traumatic stories to tell about their very noticeable chest scars, and mixed emotions about whether “to hide or not to hide” this evidence of their cardiac history, particularly in the early weeks and months post-op. Continue reading “Learning to love your open heart surgery scar” →

On being a (former) runner

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 13 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥  @HeartSisters

I felt like an archeologist last week when a friend showed me a well-worn  copy of a magazine article I’d written that, for some reason, he had been saving for years. It had been published in Runner’s World. As I re-read my guest column, it hit me that this was back in the publication’s heyday of iconic writers (all men) like marathoners Amby Burfoot, and Joe Henderson, and Dr. George Sheehan, before the magazine published its Runner’s World Complete Book of Women’s Running, and almost 20 years after I had first taken up distance running myself.

Screen Shot 2015-11-24 at 7.10.19 AMWhile revisiting this essay I’d written, I was struck by its over-arching theme of loss. It’s a universal concept common to both heart patients mourning their loss of “normalcy” and to former distance runners mourning their loss of identity as runners. 

I used to be a runner, but I’m no longer a runner now. This was how I told Runner’s World readers my story of that surreal transition:  Continue reading “On being a (former) runner” →