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

When being married makes being sick worse

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 32 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Research suggests that being happily married can have a big effect on helping us recover from serious health crises like a heart attack. For men, in fact, marriage doesn’t even have to be particularly happy to increase positive health outcomes. Just the mere state of being married, happily or miserably, apparently leads to better outcomes in males.

But not so for women. A study from the University of Utah, for example, tells us that after 15 years of follow-up, researchers found that 83% of happily wedded wives were still alive after their cardiac bypass surgery, versus only 28% of women in unhappy marriages.  They also found that women who report high levels of marital strain also report depression, high blood pressure, high LDL (bad) cholesterol, obesity and other signs of metabolic syndrome – a cluster of known risk factors for cardiovascular disease. And in 2006, the American Journal of Cardiology published a study that found patients with both severe heart disease and poor marriages had a four times higher risk of dying over a four-year period.

So consider for example, how the day-to-day reality described by these heart patients might affect their prognoses:     Continue reading “When being married makes being sick worse” →

Three types of heart happiness defined

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 6 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Dr. Martin Seligman is considered the father of what’s known as the positive psychology movement. He was once elected president of the American Psychological Association by the largest vote in that organization’s history, which must have made this self-described “natural born pessimist” feel almost happy. He’s also the author of a book that I often recommend to heart patients called Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. This gem, originally published 20 years ago, is still a valuable tool for learning skills that decades of research have shown may actually enhance our sense of wellbeing – a commodity that’s in short supply for the freshly-diagnosed heart patient. Dr. Seligman lists some basic identifiable types of the elusive state we call happiness:

‘Happiness’ is a scientifically unwieldy notion, but there are three different forms of it you can pursue:   Continue reading “Three types of heart happiness defined” →

How life’s worst tragedies turn into great speech material

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 5 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas ♥  @HeartSisters

I discovered Toastmasters back in 1987 (insert eternal thanks here to my dear friend Peter Forster for dragging me as his guest to my first meeting).  Since that day, I spent decades practicing my public speaking/ listening/thinking skills during our weekly club meetings every Thursday morning at 7 a.m. – which tells you that Toastmasters is tons o’ fun.

Or, that I’m a slow learner.

A really useful Toastmasters tip that I learned over lo these many years has been how to decide on a compelling speech topic, including this odd lesson:  “Life’s worst moments often make the best speech material”.

And that has never been more true than after I survived a heart attack.  Continue reading “How life’s worst tragedies turn into great speech material” →

A wife’s heart disease teaches her husband a big lesson

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 12 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

Physician Dr. Robin Schoenthaler once wrote in a Boston Globe column that, instead of looking for men who like those long romantic walks on the beach at sunset, women would do well to picture how the man of your dreams handles things when you’re sick. In fact, her recommendation for ideal husband material is a man who will hold your purse in the hospital waiting room.

It can be rare to hear in person from men about what it’s really like to live with us while we’re living with heart disease. It isn’t often, for example, that our WomenHeart online support community of thousands of female heart patients on Inspire.com hears directly from a real live male. But when Steve Kirsche of Wethersfield, CT stopped by to write about his own perspective as the spouse of a heart patient, I asked him for permission to reprint his personal observations here for you. Here’s what Steve had to tell us: Continue reading “A wife’s heart disease teaches her husband a big lesson” →