Tag: living with heart disease

Take your pick: carrots, eggs or coffee beans?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas

A young woman went to her grandmother to talk about life and how things were so hard for her. It seemed that as one problem was solved, a new one that was even worse cropped up. She didn’t know how she was going to make it, and wanted to give up.

She was tired of struggling.

Her grandmother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Soon the pots came to boil.

In the first she placed some carrots, in the second she placed two eggs, and in the last she placed ground coffee beans. She let them all come to a boil, without saying a word.  Continue reading “Take your pick: carrots, eggs or coffee beans?” →

Top 10 tips from the author of ‘How To Be Sick’

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 3 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Ten years ago this summer, law professor Toni Bernhard and her husband flew from their home in California to Paris, planning to immerse themselves in Parisian culture for three weeks. But on the second day there, Toni became very sick with what appeared to be an acute viral infection. She spent most of those three weeks in a Parisian bed. And ten years later, Toni is still sick.

Despite being mostly bed-ridden, she wrote a book she called How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers and she also blogs at HowToBeSick.com.

To mark her 10th anniversary milestone, the medical website KevinMD.com ran Toni’s list of 10 lessons she has learned about being sick. Here is a sampling of those tips, remarkably useful for those of us living with heart disease, too: Continue reading “Top 10 tips from the author of ‘How To Be Sick’” →

How humour can help – or hurt – your heart disease recovery

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

“My hubby is stuck with me for another 15 years as long as I keep following doctor’s orders.”

“I told my family that I now had a pig valve in my heart – but I was disappointed when the doctor told me I couldn’t keep the bacon.”

“I am determined to outlive my husband – because I want to clean out his garage!”

Heart patients often use humour like this to distract themselves from the high levels of stress and fear often associated with a life-altering diagnosis like heart disease – such as upcoming surgery, diagnostic tests, or even the ongoing awareness of significantly increased risk of future cardiac events. So reports Nicholas Lockwood, whose research focused on how heart patients use humour to help them cope with such a frightening condition – but ended up showing some surprising results.  Continue reading “How humour can help – or hurt – your heart disease recovery” →

Marriage triples our bypass surgery survival rates – but only if it’s happy

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 2 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

While the recent headlines about this new cardiac study suggest that a happy marriage can triple (and even quadruple!) your longterm survival chances after heart bypass surgery, there’s more behind this story than the wedded bliss angle.

Researchers from the University of Rochester tell us that happily married people who undergo coronary bypass surgery are three times more likely to be alive 15 years later compared to their unmarried counterparts. For happily married women, those odds can actually jump to four times higher.

But buried in the good news hype is another important fact: that for women who do not rate their marriage as happy, survival stats are virtually identical to those for unmarried women.  Continue reading “Marriage triples our bypass surgery survival rates – but only if it’s happy” →