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
A woman in the grocery store calls out from the neighbouring checkout line: “Hey! You’re the heart lady, right?” She continues, in what seems a much-too-loud voice, that she had been in the audience at one of my annual Cardiac Café presentations at the university. But “heart lady?” Is this really how I want to be known and recognized for the rest of my natural life? Continue reading “Why we keep telling – and re-telling – our heart attack stories”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Out of the chaos surrounding my heart attack emerged one overriding obsession: to just be normal again. I was desperate to feel like my old self, all the while feeling that nothing around me felt remotely normal any longer. I was tired of being “sick”. I wanted my old life back.
And I didn’t want to be a heart patient anymore. One day, in fact, weeks after I’d been discharged from hospital, I marched around the apartment gathering up all the get well cards and bouquets of beautiful flowers that filled each room – and trashed them all. (It didn’t work, by the way. I still had heart disease, albeit along with a tidied-up home!)
What I really wanted was some kind of guarantee that I’d recover perfectly one day very soon. But according to psychologist Dr. Lisa Holland, promising patients living with a chronic illness that we will “recover” may simply be setting us up for a situation that’s essentially unattainable. Instead, she warns, what we can do is rebuild our lives and move forward. Continue reading “We survive it – but do we ever recover from a heart attack?”
“It’s definitely not your heart – it’s just acid reflux!” That was the first regrettable (and wrong) thing that the E.R. doctor said to me, despite my textbook heart attack symptoms of crushing chest pain, sweating, nausea, and pain radiating down my left arm. When I raised the topic of stupid comments on Inspire’s WomenHeart online community, cardiac survivors jumped right in.
These women were all too happy to share some of the real-life comments that physicians have actually said out loud to them. Most of these dismissive comments were made shortly before these patients subsequently had to undergo life-saving cardiac procedures. Each comment is true; the names of the physicians have not been disclosed in order to protect the stupid (a word, by the way, which I’m using here in its most charitable dictionary definition: “lacking common sense, dazed, unable to think clearly”). Here goes: Continue reading “Stupid things that doctors say to heart patients”
Heart Sisters 