– posts here focus on warning signs and symptoms women experience during a cardiac event
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Just in time for Heart Month! Watch this compelling little 7-minute film featuring Stanford University heart patients and staff, and then forward the link on to every woman you care about.
Starting now, commit to adding at least one heart-healthy new lifestyle change each day.
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by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
February is Heart Month. It’s the perfect time to commit to doing something good for your heart this year. A recent Heart and Stroke Foundation survey reveals that we are not making time for healthy choices, which is contributing to the grim reality that cardiovascular disease is the #1 killer of women, and the cause of one in three deaths here in Canada.
The Heart and Stroke Foundation is urging us to make time now, so we can have time later.
Continue reading “Your heart health: “Make time now, so you can have time later””
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
“When I first became a GP in England well over 30 years ago, the early diagnosis of myocardial infarction (heart attack) was a matter of slight importance, since there was no intervention which made any difference to survival.
“You tried to reach patients in their homes quickly to relieve their pain with heroin, but only sent them to hospital if their pain was not controlled, or they were going into shock. Studies at the time indicated that patients with heart attacks survived better at home, where they were less likely to be killed with injections of lidocaine.”
Quite a difference, according to Dr. Richard Lehman, writing this in the British Medical Journal last month, compared to modern cardiac care options like clot-busting thrombolytic drugs or invasive coronary angioplasty procedures that are now routinely available to patients presenting with heart attack symptoms these days. (Unless, of course, you happen to be a woman under the age of 55 presenting to the E.R in mid-heart attack, in which case, as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, you are seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed and sent home compared to your male counterparts with the same symptoms).* But I digress . . . Continue reading “If I’d had my heart attack decades ago . . .”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
This story has been told for years, and it deserves to be told again. It’s the tale of 49-year old Beatrice Vance, who in July of 2006, arrived in the Vista Medical Center Emergency Room in Lake County, Illinois complaining of chest pain, nausea and shortness of breath.
Despite these textbook heart attack symptoms, Beatrice was not seen immediately by E.R. physicians, but was instead told to sit down in the waiting room. So she waited. And she waited. And by the time the E.R. nurse finally called her name two hours later, Beatrice Vance was slumped in her chair, already dead.
The coroner’s report determined that this heart attack was caused by a blocked coronary artery, and contributing factors were delayed and inadequate treatment.
Much later, in a truly startling decision, a coroner’s jury investigating the Beatrice Vance case didn’t just cite the hospital, but it declared this death a homicide in its ruling against the E.R. physicians and nurses working that night. Continue reading “Homicide in the E.R. – the tragic case of Beatrice Vance”
Heart Sisters 