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?” →