Too embarrassed to call 911 during a heart attack?

March 12, 2012November 13, 2022 ~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 23 Comments

When I was sent home from the Emergency Department with a misdiagnosis of acid reflux, I felt horribly embarrassed that I’d made such a fuss over nothing (well, nothing but textbook heart attack symptoms like chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain radiating down my left arm). It then took me two full weeks of increasingly debilitating cardiac symptoms before I forced myself to return to that same hospital, desperately ill yet still not completely certain this could be heart-related. After all, hadn’t an Emergency physician with the letters M.D. after his name told me quite emphatically:

“This is NOT your heart!”

It was only when my symptoms became truly unbearable that I knew I had to go back to the E.R. This extreme reluctance to get help is what doctors call “treatment-seeking delay“ behaviour, and in the middle of a heart attack, it can be a deadly delay. We already know that the average person in mid-heart attack will wait four hours before getting medical help. Why? One reason may well be that we’re too simply too embarrassed to attract attention to ourselves during a heart attack. Continue reading “Too embarrassed to call 911 during a heart attack?” →

A zebra among horses

February 29, 2012August 26, 2012 ~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

A guest post by Laura Haywood-Cory – to help celebrate Rare Disease Awareness Day, 2/29/12

“Almost three years ago, I had a heart attack at the age of 40, with no family history or elevated risk factors. I’m not diabetic, I don’t smoke, my arteries aren’t clogged, and at the time, I was training for a triathlon.

“I was in shock to wake up one morning with textbook heart attack symptoms — pain in the center of my chest that radiated down my left arm and up into my neck and jaw, I had cold sweats, I felt nauseated.

“My husband drove us to the hospital, where they treated me as if I were having a heart attack–they gave me a nitro patch, an aspirin, drew blood, did a chest X-ray and an EKG–all the while telling me that it wasn’t my heart, because I was too young and too female. Continue reading “A zebra among horses” →

How our girlfriends can help us get through the toughest times

February 25, 2012July 24, 2022 ~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 2 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

Here’s the difference between men and women. Some years ago, a couple we knew announced that they were getting a divorce. We were gobsmacked! None of our friends had seen this announcement coming from what appeared (to us) to be one of those “perfect” couples. The day we heard their news, it happened that our friend Paul was scheduled to go on a long day-hike in the mountains with the soon-to-be-single husband, just the two of them. At the end of that day, Paul’s wife waited impatiently for his return to hear the scoop about the split. When he finally arrived home, she asked him:

“Well? Well? What did he say?”

“What did he say about what?” asked Paul.

“The DIVORCE! What did he say about the DIVORCE?”

“Oh,” he replied. “It didn’t come up.”

It didn’t come up? It didn’t come up? Can you imagine two close women friends hiking together for hours and the most important personal crisis of the decade “doesn’t come up”? It would never happen. And here’s why: it turns out that when emotions and feelings are running high, women actually respond with a neurochemical reaction that propels us to seek out our women friends to debrief what is happening to us. Continue reading “How our girlfriends can help us get through the toughest times” →