Hierarchy of heart disease

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

During my first evening attending our “Heart to Heart” 7-week education series for recently diagnosed heart patients, 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 “widow maker” 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:

“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 now call the unspoken Hierarchy of Heart Disease. Continue reading “My unofficial (but weirdly true) Hierarchy of Heart Disease” →

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!”

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’” →