by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
When my little green car started making a funny ♦PING!♦ noise recently, I tried to talk myself out of what I was hearing. “I don’t think it’s quite as bad as it sounded yesterday . . .” And when my heart attack symptoms became more and more debilitating, I tried to talk myself out of them, too.
And besides, hadn’t the E.R. doctor emphatically diagnosed those symptoms (central chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain down my left arm) as merely acid reflux just two weeks earlier? In both cases, I guess I was being unrealistically hopeful. But as writer Margaret Weis once warned:
“Hope is the denial of reality.”
Denial has a bad name. To be “in denial” – whether it’s about a niggling noise coming from under the hood or about something as serious as a health crisis – is to be called foolhardy or just plain stubborn. But in some cases, according to Mayo Clinic experts, a little denial may actually be a good thing. Being in denial for a short period can even be a healthy coping mechanism, giving us time to adjust to a painful or stressful issue. Continue reading “Can denial ever be a good thing for heart patients?”
During the 1980s, the American Heart Association launched an advertising campaign that asked: “If your husband had a heart attack in bed tonight, would you know what to do?” Even the AHA thought heart disease was strictly a man’s problem back then. 
Heart Sisters 