Two years spent connected to her “heart lifeline”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 2 Comments

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Monica McFarlan was a runner, a mother of two young boys, and a very healthy 37-year-old woman when she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, associated with viral cardiomyopathy in January 2011.

For the next 3½ months, Monica was in and out of the hospital 11 times for over 45 days. By April, she and her family were told that she needed a heart transplant, and she was put on the transplant waiting list. But because her antibodies were elevated, she had to be taken off the transplant list because of the high risk that her body would reject any donor heart that was given to her. Continue reading “Two years spent connected to her “heart lifeline”” →

Things change – just more slowly than we’d like

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 15 Comments

Christopher_ColumbuChristopher Columbus on Santa Maria in 1492: painting by Emanuel Leutze, 1855

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Patience is boring and unglamorous, but a highly necessary virtue. You might not think anything is changing in life, but if you are patiently persistent, you will see change.

Consider the diary of Christopher Columbus*:

  • May 4:  On this day we sailed on.
  • May 5:  On this day we sailed on.
  • May 6:  On this day we sailed on.
  • May 7:  On this day we sailed on.
  • May 8:  Discovered land. Ate corn.”

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*  Thanks to my Toastmasters friend Teri Hustins for lending me the book Ballsy by Karen Salmansohn,  from which the Christopher Columbus example was snipped.  Image: Christopher Columbus on the Santa Maria in 1492, from a painting by Emanuel Leutze, 1855

Q:  How have you seen change happen in steps too small to appreciate at the time?

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There is no “Fair Fairy” in life

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 11 Comments

Dark Cordial PIXABAY tug of war

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

In the year 2000, I started working in the field of hospice palliative care.

That experience was more profoundly educational than any university course I’ve ever taken, any book I’ve ever read, any personal growth workshop I’ve shelled out money for.

And the biggest lessons I learned over these years stemmed from one simple truism:

“There is no ‘Fair Fairy’ in life.”    Continue reading “There is no “Fair Fairy” in life” →

Dr. Barbara Keddy: “I was pitifully ignorant about heart disease”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 31 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

heart BehanceI’m very pleased to share this with you, my heart sisters – although this is not a happy story.  It’s essentially the journal of a heart attack. The author is Dr. Barbara Keddy, a teacher of nurses, professor emerita at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and author of the book Women and Fibromyalgia* – a condition that Barbara herself has lived with for over 40 years. Barbara and I first “met” each other online when we both happened to be named recipients of the 2009 Women’s Health Hero awards from Our Bodies Ourselves of Boston that year – she representing the east coast of Canada, and I out here on the west.

I’ve been reading her Women & Fibromyalgia blog and quoting her wise words ever since (here, here and here, for example). And we’ve been casually emailing back and forth for four years – until one day in January, when I received a terse one-line message from her: she had just survived a heart attack.

Barbara’s experience is unique because she’d already been living with the constant pain of a debilitating chronic illness for decades. What happens when such a person gets hit with the double whammy of a serious heart attack on top of everything else?  Here’s her story, in her own words:  Continue reading “Dr. Barbara Keddy: “I was pitifully ignorant about heart disease”” →