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

Why hearing the diagnosis can hurt worse than the heart attack

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 6 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters


Researchers in the U.K. have found that heart attack survivors have a disturbingly high incidence of undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  Terrifying symptoms, invasive procedures, and a life-altering diagnosis of heart disease can inflict profound psychological stress.

But interestingly – no matter the body part involved – it’s the part about hearing the diagnosis that may actually be the most traumatic for us, regardless of the severity of our required medical intervention. Continue reading “Why hearing the diagnosis can hurt worse than the heart attack” →

Four ingredients in the heart patient’s recipe for stress

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 8 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas

While what stresses you is different from what stresses your neighbour, the recipe for stress is universal. So are the four ingredients in this recipe, according to the Centre for Studies on Human Stress at the University of Montréal.

This Centre, by the way, is a remarkably helpful resource if you’re one of those people who have become so chronically stressed day to day that you no longer think this state of being is even abnormal anymore.

Your body’s natural response to psychological stressors – the release of stress hormones – can lead to poor health outcomes if it becomes chronic.

It struck me that the Centre’s list of four ingredients that reliably elicit this stress response are also those that make a heart disease diagnosis itself so continually stressful.  They include:   Continue reading “Four ingredients in the heart patient’s recipe for stress” →

How we adapt after a heart attack may depend on what we believe this diagnosis means

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 9 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥   @HeartSisters

There are at least 12 commonly used measurement tools available to the medical profession that look at how patients navigate “the search for meaning in chronic illness”. Clinical tools like the Psychosocial Adjustment To Illness Inventory or the Meaning of Illness Questionnaire have been used on cancer and AIDS patients, as well as others living with chronic disease. But research, including this study, found that limiting factors in the success of these 12 tools included “the infrequent use of some of the instruments clinically or in research.”

I can’t help but wonder why these readily available assessment tools are not being administered routinely to patients who have been freshly diagnosed with heart disease – a serious medical crisis that begs to be examined for its influence on our “psychosocial adjustment” to it. I only learned about these tools two years after my own heart attack.

This lack of medical attention to the profound psychological impact of a cardiac event is disturbing. As Dr. Gilles Dupuis of the Université du Québec and the Montréal Heart Institute reported in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, post-traumatic stress disorder following heart attack is a largely under-diagnosed and unrecognized phenomenon that can actually put survivors at risk of another attack. Continue reading “How we adapt after a heart attack may depend on what we believe this diagnosis means” →

Welcome to your new country

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 39 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   Heart Sisters on Blue Sky

My family doctor once compared my uneasy adjustment since surviving a misdiagnosed heart attack to being like a stressful move to a foreign country.

I used to be pretty comfortable in my old country, pre-heart attack.

In my old country, I was a healthy, active, outgoing former distance runner. I had a wonderful family and a whack of close friends, a meaningful career I really loved, a crazy-cute cat, longtime community volunteer roles, a condo renovated top to bottom in a charming leafy neighbourhood of the most beautiful city in Canada – and a busy, happy, regular life.

Then on May 6, 2008, after being misdiagnosed and sent home from the Emergency Department despite textbook cardiac symptoms, I was finally admitted to the same hospital with a diagnosis of myocardial infarction – what doctors still call the “widowmaker” heart attack.

And that was the day I moved far, far away to a different country.  Continue reading “Welcome to your new country” →