by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Consider the familiar pain we call brain freeze.
That’s the universal experience of feeling a sharp pain in the forehead right between your eyes after you eat or drink something that’s icy cold. But when you feel this pain, it simply means that your hypersensitive nervous system is making a mistake.
Continue reading “Brain freeze, heart disease and pain self-management”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Every morning, I clip it onto my belt, or tuck it into a hip pocket. I very carefully attach its sticky little electrode pads onto the skin just over my heart, tucking their long black wires under my clothing. Lately, I also have to hold the electrodes in place on my skin with surgical tape because they’re starting to lose their stickiness after so much daily wear. I turn on the black box at my waist, and adjust its two knobs to the correct power levels. I feel a prickly little buzz pulsating across my chest.
It’s called Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS), and it involves electrical impulses called neuromodulation to treat the chest pain (angina) of Inoperable Coronary Microvascular Disease (MVD) – a disorder of the smallest of the coronary arteries (too small to stent, too small to bypass).
My portable TENS unit is about the size of an average cell phone. You may know the much larger version of this machine if you’ve ever had physiotherapy treatments following a muscle injury. The only wounded muscle it’s working on for me now, however, are those in my heart. Emerging cardiac research is showing that, just as the TENS machine works on improving blood flow, reducing inflammation and speeding up healing for an injured shoulder or knee, it may bring the same benefits to heart patients with MVD like mine.
But I do have a love-hate relationship with my little black box. Continue reading “My love-hate relationship with my little black box”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
There are four main types of angina pectoris women should know about, no matter how you pronounce it: ‘anj-EYE-nuh’ in Canada or Australia, or ‘AN-gin-uh’ in the U.S. This term is translated as “strangling in the chest”.
The chest pain called angina is not the same as a heart attack – but it can feel like one and can in fact lead to one. Here are the four types of angina you need to know:
Heart Sisters 