by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
For weeks following hospital discharge after my “widow maker” heart attack, I kept forcing a “Fine, just fine!” smile when around others each day, desperately trying to make sense out of a cardiac diagnosis so shocking that it made no sense to me. What I later learned was that sense-making turns out to be a remarkably common early response to a serious medical crisis. Continue reading ““What? So what? Now what?” Self-reflection for the new heart patient”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
There are at least 12 commonly used measurement tools available to the medical profession that look at how patients navigate “the search for meaning in chronic illness”. Clinical tools like the Psychosocial Adjustment To Illness Inventory or the Meaning of Illness Questionnaire have been used on cancer and AIDS patients, as well as others living with chronic disease. But research, including this study, has found that limiting factors in the success of such tools included “the infrequent use of some of the instruments clinically or in research.”
I can’t help but wonder why these readily available assessment tools are not being administered routinely to patients who are freshly diagnosed with heart disease – a serious medical crisis that begs to be examined for its influence on our “psychosocial adjustment” to it. I only learned about these long-established tools two years after my own heart attack, and by then my adjustment period was pretty well done.
Continue reading “How we adapt after a heart attack depends on what we believe the diagnosis means”
Heart Sisters 