Category: Women and heart attacks

– posts here focus on warning signs and symptoms women experience during a cardiac event

Biology or bias? Women twice as likely to die after heart attack

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ Leave a comment

woman heart tattoo Image.0.0.1

The CBC (our Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) did a report this week about women and heart disease that included an interview with Dr. Beth Abramson, a Toronto cardiologist and spokesperson for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.  She was responding to results of a new study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that suggests women are almost twice as likely to die within 30 days of a heart attack compared with men. Dr. Abramson said:

“It’s sometimes hard to sort out if there is a difference in biology between men and women, or if there is a gender bias.“

The study’s lead author, Dr. Jeffrey Berger of New York University Medical Center, votes for biology.   Continue reading “Biology or bias? Women twice as likely to die after heart attack” →

Could ‘goodism’ and self-sacrifice be linked to women’s heart disease outcomes?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 9 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

These days, whenever I tell my audiences about the hours leading up to my hospitalization for a heart attack last year, I ask them to guess what I would have done had those horrific cardiac symptoms been happening to my daughter (or my next-door neighbour, or even a perfect stranger) during that endless cross-country flight back home to the West Coast. Would I have patted her grim, sweaty face and whispered:

“Just try to hang on, honey. We’ll be home in nine hours…”

.

No, my Heart Sisters, I would have been screaming bloody murder for the Air Canada crew to get help immediately, even if it meant turning the damned plane around.  But since these attacks were happening to me, and not to somebody else, I chose instead the unwise and potentially fatal option of just slinking down in my seat, very still, hour after hour, trying not to die. Continue reading “Could ‘goodism’ and self-sacrifice be linked to women’s heart disease outcomes?” →

Bypassing bypass surgery by growing new arteries

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 86 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

The human body is endlessly fascinating, isn’t it? Consider how humans get started in the first place – only after one tiny sperm, one of hundreds of millions, has somehow negotiated its way past the lethal acid coating the vagina and made its long journey up to the waiting egg.  The odds are stupefyingly against that one brave little sperm. How did any of us even get born?

Also, consider the heart.

Before my heart attack, I had never heard of the heart’s little collateral arteries. These are small, normally closed arteries that, in times of dire need (like a blocked coronary artery that can lead to a heart attack) can “wake up” and enlarge enough to form a kind of detour around the blockage, thus providing an alternate route of blood supply to feed the oxygen-starved heart muscle. Do-it-yourself bypass surgery! Continue reading “Bypassing bypass surgery by growing new arteries” →

How does it really feel to have a heart attack? Women survivors answer that question

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 93 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥   @HeartSisters

Having a heart attack felt nothing like I thought it would feel.   For one thing, unlike sudden cardiac arrest, in which the heart stops beating and you stop breathing, during my heart attack (myocardial infarction), my heart continued beating, and I was walking, talking and conscious throughout despite horrific symptoms – so how could I possibly be having a heart attack?

Like most women, I’d never really thought about my heart – except maybe when running up that killer Quadra Street hill with my running group. Yet heart disease kills six times more women than breast cancer each year (in fact, it kills more women than all forms of cancer combined).

Women need to know all the potential symptoms of a heart attack – both typical and atypical. And by the way, I’ve stopped using the word “atypical“ to describe any non-chest pain symptom that women experience during a heart attack, because as paramedic and documentary filmmaker (“A Typical Heart“) Cristina D’Alessandro likes to say: 

“Why are our cardiac symptoms called ‘atypical’ when women are more than half the population?”

I asked some female survivors to share their very first symptoms. Their heart attack stories may surprise you. If you need help translating some of the heart jargon, visit my patient-friendly jargon-free glossary of cardiology terms and abbreviations.

Read their stories