While I was in my hospital’s Coronary Care Unit recuperating from a heart attack, my longtime family physician knew nothing about what had just happened to her patient of over 32 years. At some point, a hospital report signed by the cardiologist in charge of my care was sent off to her (probably by fax – and by the way, can you name any other profession that still uses the fax machine as a mode of such sensitive, important and personal communication?) Continue reading “Is your doctor talking to your other doctors?”
Tag: widowmaker heart attack
“I’m the least depressed person on earth, except when I’m depressed”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
When I learned that Dr. Sherwin Nuland was going to be doing a guest lecture at the University of Victoria here back in 2012, I was among the first in town to book tickets. I loved his book called How We Die (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) ever since I’d featured his chapter on death and heart disease three years earlier here.
His sold-out UVic audience was enthralled by his engaging manner and compelling excerpts read from his newest book called The Art of Aging: A Doctor’s Prescription for Well-Being.
But I was even more intrigued by this famous surgeon/Yale University professor’s personal stories of his own experience living with debilitating depression – a depression so crippling, so impossible to shift, that in his 40s, his doctors even considered doing a pre-frontal lobotomy. Continue reading ““I’m the least depressed person on earth, except when I’m depressed””
How women can have heart attacks without having any blocked arteries
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Turns out that the kind of heart attack that I had (caused by a 95% blockage in the big left anterior descending coronary artery) – the so-called widowmaker heart attack – may actually be relatively uncommon in women. You might guess that fact by its nickname. It’s not, after all, called the “widower-maker”.
While cardiologists warn that heart disease can’t be divided into male and female forms, there are some surprising differences. Cardiologist Dr. Amir Lerman at the world famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told the Los Angeles Times recently:
“When it comes to acute heart attacks and sudden death from cardiac arrest, women have these kinds of events much more often without any obstructions in their coronary arteries.”
Instead, it appears that a significant portion of women suffer from another form of heart disease altogether. It affects not the superhighway coronary arteries but rather the smaller arteries, called microvessels. These tiny arteries deliver blood directly to the heart muscle.
Ironically, I can now boast two diagnoses for the price of one – first, the widowmaker heart attack caused by a fully occluded coronary artery back in 2008, and then, after several months of puzzling, ongoing cardiac symptoms – like chest pain, shortness of breath, and crushing fatigue – a second diagnosis of inoperable coronary microvascular disease. Continue reading “How women can have heart attacks without having any blocked arteries”
How doctors discovered that women have heart attacks, too
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Following my heart attack, my family doctor told me that when she was in medical school, the type of heart attack that I’d had was called a ‘widowmaker‘.
This was apparently because a full blockage like mine in this particular coronary artery was usually fatal, thus making the patient’s wife an instant widow. Please note the gender imbalance: men – the ones who could ‘make’ a ‘widow’ – were considered to be the ones suffering this kind of heart attack. Doctors don’t, for example, call it the widower maker . . .
Alas, there are still doctors who are unaware that, since 1984, more women than men die of heart disease each year. An American Heart Association survey found that only 8% of physicians (and an even more appalling 17% of cardiologists!) actually knew that heart disease kills more women than men annually.
So I was intrigued to run across this chronological overview on Gender and Cardiovascular Disease showing how since 1970, the medical profession has gradually – and I do mean gradually – wisened up to the reality that heart disease is a woman’s disease, too. Continue reading “How doctors discovered that women have heart attacks, too”
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