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
Until I had a heart attack, I didn’t know that one of the biggest risk factors for having a cardiac event like mine is having already had one. Heart disease, a chronic and progressive diagnosis, is the gift that keeps on giving. And as I wrote here, one of the Big Lessons for me has been that, although my doctors can “squish blockages, burn rogue electrical circuits, and implant lifesaving devices”, their heroic efforts do not address what originally caused this damage to my coronary arteries in the first place – likely decades before my heart attack struck. See also: The Cure Myth
In fact, women are twice as likely to have a second heart attack in the six years following the first compared to our male counterparts.(1) No wonder sobering stats like this can drive the freshly-diagnosed heart patient to an exhausting and fearful state of acute hypervigilance. Continue reading “Hypervigilance: waiting for that second heart attack”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Eight years ago today, I was hospitalized for a myocardial infarction – or what my doctors referred to as the “widow maker” heart attack. (Note the gender-biased semantics here, heart sisters: docs don’t call a cardiac event caused by a blocked left anterior descending coronary artery the “widower maker”, do they?)
I am, frankly, surprised to be here writing this today. Continue reading “Happy 8th Heart-iversary to me!”
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 