left ventricle – Heart Sisters

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

Put your hand on your heart right now. I’m guessing that your hand is likely in the correct general location (although if you’re like my American friends singing their national anthem, your hand is resting on your left chest area rather than over the heart’s actual central chest location, slightly tipped to the left). So go ahead and slide your hand a wee bit to the right where it belongs.

Now compare that little exercise to how well you’d know the location (or function) of your liver or your pancreas.

I’m pretty sure if we were playing Pin The Tail On the Major Organ, we’d lose on those two examples.

That’s why I loved Dr. Roxanne Sukol‘s creative and plain-English description of the heart. Dr. Sukol is the founder of Your Health Is On Your Plate, and has spent much of the past 15 years making complex medical information easy for the rest of us to understand. Here’s how she describes our hearts: Continue reading ““The heart is a house with four rooms”” →

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” →