Tag: blocked arteries

Revisiting the “widow maker” heart attack

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 7 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥    @HeartSisters

In 2018, many viewers of the hit NBC television drama “This Is Us”  learned the term “widow maker heart attack” for the first time when the beloved main character Jack Pearson was pronounced dead. As TIME magazine later reported, online searches for that term spiked more than 5,000 per cent in the hours after that episode aired. Some viewers took to social media to tell their stories about loved ones who had died from – or survived – their own cardiac events.

Television is so educational!           .    Continue reading “Revisiting the “widow maker” heart attack” →

Do women need different treatment of coronary artery disease?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 9 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

Cardiologist Dr. William Bestermann, in reviewing his own 40+ year career as a physician, now concludes that, in all of medicine, “there is no better example of the disconnect between what we know and what we do than in the case of women with coronary artery disease.” I’m a woman who has survived a widowmaker heart attack, and now lives with coronary microvascular disease, and I’ve only been writing about such sentiment for eight years. As Dr. B. explains bluntly:

“Every other week, I see a woman who has had symptoms of coronary artery disease and has been told that the problem is her esophagus – or worse – depression or anxiety.  She is told in effect: ‘Go home, take your anti-anxiety drugs, you will be fine!’  What she has been told is often wrong – too often, dead wrong!” Continue reading “Do women need different treatment of coronary artery disease?” →

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” →