Dr. Georg Eifert – Heart Sisters

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

“It’s 2 a.m. and I think I might be having a heart attack. Right now I have a tight chest and pain in my left arm and in my elbow that comes and goes; early this week, I was having pain in my left and right legs. What should I do?”

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“I’m sitting in bed and have been up for hours. For four days, I have been having upper right back pain up to the neck. I cannot turn my head left. Tonight I have pain in my elbow and a tingling all the way down my right arm and to my fingers. I’m only 29 and a healthy weight. I need some answers. Do I need to go to the ER?”

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“I have most of these symptoms. My mom thinks I’m fine. I really think she doesn’t understand. I can be heading to a heart attack any day soon. And I’m only 14, almost 15 in a couple of days.”

These represent just a tiny sampling of the symptom questions that my blog readers often send me. My response to each of these is virtually always some variation of this statement: Continue reading ““It’s 2 a.m. and I think I’m having a heart attack”” →

by Carolyn Thomas

It’s distressingly common in cardiac circles to run into people who don’t have heart disease, but who are very certain that they do. When I first heard some of their stories, I suspected that these people are being misdiagnosed, but the reality may instead be that there’s no heart disease here at all.

This scenario came up recently with a woman with few if any cardiac symptoms, no definitive test results, and very little reason for believing she might have a heart condition. Yet she was so utterly convinced a heart attack was imminent that she described feeling like a “ticking time bomb”. A fellow heart attack survivor, far braver than I, suggested to this woman that she might be experiencing a phenomenon called catastrophizing. Continue reading ““Catastrophizing” – why we feel sicker than we actually are” →