by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
In 2018, Dr. Dhruv Khullar warned his colleagues at an American Board of Internal Medicine conference that patients need answers on three dimensions of trust:
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
A friend’s daughter (who happens to be a cardiac nurse) phoned to check on me a few days after I was discharged from the hospital following my heart attack. I felt so relieved to hear Kate’s voice because something was really starting to worry me: I was still having chest pain.
Hadn’t the blocked coronary artery that had caused my “widow maker” heart attack just recently been magically unblocked? Wasn’t that newly revascularized artery now propped wide open with a shiny metal stent? Shouldn’t I be feeling better?
And that’s when I heard the words “stretch pain” for the first time. . . Continue reading “Post-stent chest pain”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Like most heart patients who get their blocked coronary arteries opened up (or “revascularized“) at Victoria’s Royal Jubilee Hospital, my stent was implanted by inserting a slim catheter into an artery in my wrist and threading it up, up, up into my heart, a procedure known in the cath labs of the world as a Transradial Intervention (TRI).
But if I had been in an American hospital, my cardiologist would have more than likely threaded that catheter through the larger femoral artery in my upper thigh instead of my wrist, despite growing evidence suggesting significantly safer results, less bleeding, fewer complications, superior outcomes, and resounding patient preference for the radial approach.(1) In fact, while cardiologists across Canada, Europe and Asia are moving towards using radial as a default access, American cardiologists lag behind.
I just don’t get it. Canadian coronary arteries simply cannot be that much different from those of American heart patients. Continue reading “Doc chat: in the cath lab with a “radial evangelist””
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Being asked to write a book review is tricky. Authors hope you will be kind, while you hope the book at best might tell you something that every other book for heart patients hasn’t already told you. A review copy of the book Your Personal Guide: Angioplasty (Allen Jeremias, Susan S. Bartell)* sat on my coffee table for weeks, until one day, I finally got tired of looking at this latest addition to my living room decor and decided to give it a go. And within a very few pages, I learned some fascinating things I didn’t know before. Continue reading “10 things I didn’t know about angioplasty until I read this book”
Heart Sisters 