♥ It’s Heart Month! ♥
Watch and learn, ladies: This is Jennifer’s Story (2:25)
from The Heart Truth: National Heart, Blood & Lung Institute
See more of Jennifer Donelan’s story here or here, about surviving Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection (SCAD).
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Q: What are YOU doing to help your own heart this month?
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by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Being asked to write a book review is tricky. Authors hope you will be kind, while you hope the book at best might tell you something that every other book for heart patients hasn’t already told you. A review copy of the book Your Personal Guide: Angioplasty (Allen Jeremias, Susan S. Bartell)* sat on my coffee table for weeks, until one day, I finally got tired of looking at this latest addition to my living room decor and decided to give it a go. And within a very few pages, I learned some fascinating things I didn’t know before. Continue reading “10 things I didn’t know about angioplasty until I read this book”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Jennifer Donelan was a 36-year old television news reporter for ABC News 7 in Washington, DC, covering a dramatic story one day about a local 4-month old baby girl who had been found in her crib, unresponsive. After her live shot on the 5 o’clock newscast, Jennifer was waiting near her car when she started to feel a very strange pain in her chest. We pick up her dramatic story there, as told in Jennifer’s own words:
“I remember looking at my car and thinking: ‘I need to go home and lay down.’ Then the pain started to worsen. I took a few steps and my left arm went numb. Continue reading “The unforgettable diagnosis: “You’re having a heart attack!””
A guest post by Laura Haywood-Cory – to help celebrate Rare Disease Awareness Day, 2/29/12
“Almost three years ago, I had a heart attack at the age of 40, with no family history or elevated risk factors. I’m not diabetic, I don’t smoke, my arteries aren’t clogged, and at the time, I was training for a triathlon.
“I was in shock to wake up one morning with textbook heart attack symptoms — pain in the center of my chest that radiated down my left arm and up into my neck and jaw, I had cold sweats, I felt nauseated.
“My husband drove us to the hospital, where they treated me as if I were having a heart attack–they gave me a nitro patch, an aspirin, drew blood, did a chest X-ray and an EKG–all the while telling me that it wasn’t my heart, because I was too young and too female. Continue reading “A zebra among horses”
Heart Sisters 