Cardiac nurse learns firsthand about women’s heart disease

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

Rose is now training for a big 10k road race on May 1st. She’s sharing this experience with thousands of runners, but few of them are likely heart patients like she is. Fewer still are longtime cardiac care nurses who have the chance to learn firsthand what being a heart patient is like.

I met Rose in person when she came into our hospital’s Patient & Family Resource Centre on the cardiology unit where I volunteer on Monday afternoons. She turned out to be a good example of how even a veteran cardiac care nurse who’s barely 44 years old can suffer from life-threatening coronary artery disease.  Continue reading “Cardiac nurse learns firsthand about women’s heart disease” →

Heart disease: “You’ve come a long way, baby!” – or have you?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 3 Comments

Over the past decade, studies have suggested that almost twice as many women are now aware that heart disease is our leading cause of death. But awareness of this fact is still disturbingly low. For example, when cardiologist Dr. Lori Mosca of Columbia University Medical Center surveyed 2,300 women to measure their awareness of heart disease risk and to evaluate awareness trends since 1997, her results showed:

  • although awareness of heart disease has improved since 1997, one-third of women are still unaware that it is the leading cause of death in females
  • many women continue to believe that unproven therapies will reduce their heart disease risk
  • only about one-half of women said they would call 911 if they thought they were having symptoms of a heart attack, which Mosca said was “incredibly discouraging.” Continue reading “Heart disease: “You’ve come a long way, baby!” – or have you?” →

Are you too hard on yourself?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

I'm the little blonde standing up...
   I’m the little blonde with the funny haircut

When I was a little girl in the 1950s, my parents were stingy with praise and magnanimous with criticism. To be otherwise would result in a child developing a “swelled head”, which, as all parents knew back then, would be the worst possible thing that could ever happen to any child.

“She really thinks she’s SOMEBODY!” was a phrase delivered with withering contempt by my mother in describing any person whose sense of self-esteem seemed even remotely healthy.

Nobody, according to my parents, likes a kid with a swelled head. The only way to prevent that catastrophe was to be tough on your children, and in turn teach them to be equally tough on themselves. You could thus help them avoid growing up to be spoiled and self-indulgent adults who acted like they were “SOMEBODY!”

But Dr. Kristin Neff, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, now believes that children who grow up like this end up experiencing little self-compassion when life’s difficulties hit them. Her book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself will  sound reassuring to those of us living with a heart disease diagnosis.  Continue reading “Are you too hard on yourself?” →

Study: statin drugs overprescribed for healthy adults

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 2 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

A study from Johns Hopkins Hospital may be very bad news for drug companies that make statin drugs for cholesterol management.(1)  Statins, of course, are considered the darlings of Big Pharma. I’ve heard cardiologists joke (at least, I think they were joking) that statins are so fabulous at lowering our LDL (bad) cholesterol that we should be putting the drugs into our drinking water.

Virtually all heart attack survivors are now routinely prescribed statins (whether they have high cholesterol or not) and there’s a major marketing push for docs to prescribe statins as cardiovascular preventive therapy for virtually all adults, particularly to reduce blood levels of the inflammatory byproducts called C-reactive protein. But the Johns Hopkins study lead investigator Dr. Michael Blaha has this important new warning:   Continue reading “Study: statin drugs overprescribed for healthy adults” →