Tag: Mayo Clinic SCAD research

When you know more than your doctors about your diagnosis

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 17 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

One of my blog readers needlessly suffered debilitating cardiac symptoms for a number of years before she was finally correctly diagnosed (thanks to a second opinion) with coronary microvascular disease (MVD). During those years, she’d read everything she could get her hands on in a desperate effort to solve this mystery. But when she asked her own physician if MVD might be the culprit, he dismissed this diagnostic possibility, adding that he “didn’t believe” in coronary microvascular disease.

Didn’t believe in it?!

Please note, darling readers, that we’re not talking about the Tooth Fairy here.

We’re talking about a woman living with a cardiac condition that’s been well-studied (as in, peer-reviewed studies done by respected heart researchers and published in actual real-life medical journals).

Continue reading “When you know more than your doctors about your diagnosis” →

When your artery tears – Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 29 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

.

Laura, a 40-year old American heart attack survivor, told me this story of her own cardiac event:

“I was asleep and my symptoms woke me up. I had several simultaneous symptoms, but the first one seemed to be chest pain in the centre-left, somewhat under my left breast area. I’d never felt anything like it, so sometimes it’s hard to describe – it wasn’t sharp or crushing or burning, more like a dull pressure. I also had pain down the inside of my left arm that radiated up into the left side of my jaw and my left ear.

“I was very overheated, and I felt like I was going to throw up. The nausea and overheating faded, but the pain – chest, arm, jaw – stayed. In hospital, I was diagnosed with a heart attack caused by SCAD – spontaneous coronary artery dissection, treated with six stents.”

It used to be seen as a deadly condition that was only correctly diagnosed post-mortem.  In fact, the condition was first identified during an autopsy in 1931 after a woman in her 40s had died during a SCAD heart attack. Continue reading “When your artery tears – Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection” →