Tag: heart attack

The seven levels in the ‘Hierarchy of Heart Disease’

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 9 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

During my first evening at our “Heart to Heart” support group, the man sitting next to me leaned over and asked me: “What are you in for?”

I told him that I’d had what doctors call the “widowmaker” heart attack two weeks earlier, and that I now had a stainless steel stent implanted in a major coronary artery that had been 99% blocked.  He interrupted me with a cheery:

“Me too! But I have THREE stents!”

As he went on and on in exquisite detail about his cardiac event, I felt like my own was suddenly pretty puny by comparison. Three stents? How could I possibly compete with that? My previously-fascinating heart attack misdiagnosis story now seemed hardly even worth mentioning, really.

I came to observe during the  following weeks and months that heart patients, consciously or not, seem to slot themselves arbitrarily into what I call the unspoken Hierarchy of Heart Disease.  Continue reading “The seven levels in the ‘Hierarchy of Heart Disease’” →

Gender differences in heart attack treatment contribute to women’s higher death rates

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 9 Comments

The alarming results of a study undertaken in France highlighted serious gender differences in cardiac treatment of men and women.  These shocking differences contribute to a higher death rate among women suffering a heart attack.

The French study(1) investigated more than 3,000 patients, 32% women, who had been treated for heart attacks over a two-year period.

Lead author Dr. Francois Schiele, Cardiology Chief at the University Hospital in Besancon, France, presented the results of the research at the American College of Cardiology’s 59th Annual Scientific Session in Atlanta last month. Dr. Schiele’s team found that, on average, the women studied:

Is sudden cardiac arrest the same thing as a heart attack?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 10 Comments

red heart on black

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

One of the reasons that I believed the Emergency physician who had misdiagnosed me with acid reflux during my heart attack was my very inaccurate perception of what a heart attack looks like.

I used to think that heart attacks happen mostly to men.  Old men.  Old fat men who are out-of-shape-chain smokers and heavy drinkers.  Old fat out-of-shape smoking drinking men who one day out on the golf course suddenly clutch their chests and keel over, unconscious.  CPR.  911. Ambulance sirens screaming. Paramedics. Defibrillator paddles. That’s a heart attack, right?

Wrong, my dear heart sisters. Continue reading “Is sudden cardiac arrest the same thing as a heart attack?” →

Deep thoughts about death and heart disease

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 3 Comments

red poppies

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

This week, I’ve been reading Yale Medical School professor Dr. Sherwin Nuland’s amazing book How We Die – which is not nearly as grim as it sounds.  In fact, it’s an endlessly fascinating read. For heart attack survivors, the concept of death can become more interesting than we ever imagined it to be.

We live in a death-denying society. People don’t want to think about death, much less talk about it. As Dr. Nuland writes, death to most of us occurs “in sterile seclusion cloaked in euphemism and taboo”. We don’t even like using the ‘D’ word. Instead of ‘dying’, we prefer to “pass on”, or “pass away” or “go to be with Jesus”. Continue reading “Deep thoughts about death and heart disease” →