by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Here’s my theory: few health crises in life are as frightening as surviving a cardiac event. I developed this theory while I was busy having my own “widow maker“ heart attack in the spring of 2008. Continue reading “What I wish I knew back then: “How heart patients can make peace with an errant organ””
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
The “new normal”. It’s what the freshly-diagnosed heart patient is supposed to get used to now. The implication seems clear: “Forget about your old life and the person you once were.” Many of us fight that “new normal” label, but there might be another way to look at this. . Continue reading “The “new normal” – and why patients hate it”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Since returning from my 2008 WomenHeart Science & Leadership training at Mayo Clinic, I’ve spent a lot of time meeting, listening to, speaking with, writing for and hearing from countless other heart patients. Once the dust settles immediately following a cardiac diagnosis – that time my heart sister Jodi Jackson engagingly calls “post-heart attack stun“ – I’ve observed that a recurring theme among so many of the freshly-diagnosed is a sense of anger at what has just hit them.
Here’s a fairly typical example.
A woman I met recently had spent decades making good health an important priority in her life, and then – WHAM! – a heart attack, out of the blue. Her subsequent anger is hardly surprising: “How could this have happened to ME, of all people? I’ve been doing everything right! I never saw this coming! And now you’re telling me that I’m stuck with this chronic and progressive medical condition for the rest of my life?!?” Continue reading “When a serious diagnosis makes you feel mad as hell”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Here’s my theory: few health crises in life are as traumatic as surviving a cardiac event. I developed this theory while I was busy having my own heart attack in the spring of 2008.
For starters, cardiac symptoms often come out of the blue (in fact, almost two-thirds of women who die of coronary heart disease have no previous symptoms.(1) Having a heart attack can feel so unimaginably terrifying that almost all of us try desperately to dismiss or deny cardiac symptoms. And according to a report published in Global Heart, the journal of the World Heart Federation, women are twice as likely to die within one year even if they do survive a heart attack compared to our male counterparts.(2)
So if – and each of these is still, sadly, a great big fat IF for too many women – we survive the actual cardiac event, and if we are near a hospital that’s able to provide an experienced team of cardiologists/cardiovascular surgeons/cardiac nurses, and if we are correctly diagnosed, and if we receive timely and appropriate treatment, and if the resulting damage to our oxygen-deprived heart muscle is not too severe, we get to finally go home, safe and sound.
And that’s where the real trauma starts. Continue reading “The day I made peace with an errant organ”
Heart Sisters 