Would it kill you to treat your patients with respect?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 21 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Not since I was a teenager having my wisdom teeth surgically removed with the aid of that luscious nitrous oxide laughing gas have I floated home from a dental appointment feeling so exhilarated. Because yesterday, I took a personal stand against rudeness and disrespect in the delivery of my own health care.

Regular readers here will already know how surviving a heart attack (plus, I suspect, my advancing progress towards Cranky Old Lady Land) have made me increasingly ticked off by health care providers who:

  • treat us as if we are simply a piece of meat on a slab – and worse, an invisible piece of meat on a slab
  • forget that we are far more than just the 10 o’clock procedure in their daytimers
  • disregard the fact that there is an actual real live human being attached to the body part they happen to be working on

My recent mission in life seems to be to put the brakes on this kind of pervasively rude behaviour, one health care provider at a time.   Continue reading “Would it kill you to treat your patients with respect?” →

Too embarrassed to call 911 during a heart attack?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 23 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

When I was sent home from the Emergency Department with a misdiagnosis of acid reflux, I felt horribly embarrassed that I’d made such a fuss over nothing (well, nothing but textbook heart attack symptoms like chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain radiating down my left arm).  It then took me two full weeks of increasingly debilitating cardiac symptoms before I forced myself to return to that same hospital, desperately ill yet still not completely certain this could be heart-related. After all, hadn’t an Emergency physician with the letters M.D. after his name told me quite emphatically:

“This is NOT your heart!”

It was only when my symptoms became truly unbearable that I knew I had to go back to the E.R. This extreme reluctance to get help is what doctors call “treatment-seeking delay“ behaviour, and in the middle of a heart attack, it can be a deadly delay. We already know that the average person in mid-heart attack will wait four hours before getting medical help.  Why? One reason may well be that we’re too simply too embarrassed to attract attention to ourselves during a heart attack.   Continue reading “Too embarrassed to call 911 during a heart attack?” →

Squishing, burning and implanting your heart troubles away

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 8 Comments

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by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Like the eminently quotable cardiologist Dr. John Mandrola once wrote on one of my favourite heart blogs:

“We urge patients to eat less, exercise more, and not to smoke. But when they don’t do these things, we still squish their blockages, burn their rogue electrical circuits, and implant lifesaving devices in their hearts.”

As a heart attack survivor, one of the Big Lessons for me has been that although my doctors can “squish, burn and implant” all they like, their heroic efforts do not address what originally caused this damage to my coronary arteries in the first place.   Continue reading “Squishing, burning and implanting your heart troubles away” →

Bereavement eating: does grief cause carb cravings?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 12 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

I’ve heard it said that some people experience a loss of appetite during stressful times like a death in the family.  These people are not my relatives. Indeed, in our Ukrainian family tradition, we eat when we’re happy, we eat when we’re upset, and we eat during all possible emotions in between.

Every family gathering surrounding my mother’s recent death was no exception.

For example, the delicious lunch following her funeral service was a true labour of love, prepared by the women of my mother’s church, just as the women of churches, mosques, temples, synagogues and neighbourhoods around the world have been doing for mourners since time began.  Continue reading “Bereavement eating: does grief cause carb cravings?” →