by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Since 1973 (when I was just a tiny baby), my work background has been in journalism, communications and public relations, spanning almost four decades in corporate, government and non-profit sectors ranging from Mercedes Benz to the Salvation Army. I’m a refugee from the Niagara Falls area to the balmy west coast of Canada; I’m the author of two west coast travel books and one book about living with heart disease; my little garden won a national garden contest from Gardening Life magazine; I once had lunch with His Royal Highness Prince Edward (yes, that Prince Edward); and many years ago while a student at Queen’s University, I accidentally smashed our old Buick into the station wagon owned by “The English Patient” author, Michael Ondaatje.
I have two grown kidlets who, luckily for me, live close by with their respective families (including two darling grandkids).
But in May 2008, while working at the Victoria Hospice and Palliative Care Society, I became a member of an exclusive club that nobody wants to join: I was hospitalized for a myocardial infarction, what doctors call the “widow-maker” heart attack.
But here’s the frightening part of this story: two weeks earlier, I had been sent home from the same hospital’s Emergency Department with a misdiagnosis of acid reflux, despite presenting with textbook Hollywood heart attack symptoms like chest pain, nausea, sweating, and pain radiating down my left arm. “You’re in the right demographic for acid reflux!” was the confident pronouncement of that Emerg doc.
I left hospital that day feeling supremely embarrassed and apologetic because I’d wasted their time making a big fuss “over nothing!” I continued to suffer increasingly debilitating symptoms for two full weeks (but hey! at least I knew it wasn’t my heart!) until symptoms finally became so unbearable that I again sought medical help – this time to a different Emerg doc and a revised diagnosis of “significant heart disease”.
I later learned (while attending the life-altering WomenHeart Science & Leadership Symposium for Women with Heart Disease at the world-famous Mayo Clinic) that, according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, women my age and younger are seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed in mid-heart attack and sent home from Emergency compared to our male counterparts presenting with identical symptoms.(1)
I launched this blog Heart Sisters in 2009, mostly just to help publicize the free “Pinot & Prevention” presentations on women’s heart health that I started doing after returning from my Mayo training. So far, this site has attracted over 20 million views from 190 countries! My writing’s also been published internationally, including “Heart Failure: it’s Time To Finally Change the F-word”, my editorial in the British Medical Journal. And in 2014, the BMJ invited me to be a Patient Reviewer for cardiology papers submitted to the journal for publication, part of their innovative peer review process.
At about the same time, Johns Hopkins University Press approached me to ask if I would consider writing a book based on my Heart Sisters blog articles. Thus began a two-year adventure culminating in our book called “A Woman’s Guide to Living With Heart Disease“; ask for it at your local library, favourite bookshop (please support your local independent bookseller), from Amazon – or if you order it directly from Johns Hopkins University Press, you can save 30% off the list price by using their code HTWN.
I’ve been interviewed many times over the years about my story of diagnostic error, my Heart Sisters blog and my book – you can find links to most of these media interviews here.
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(1) Pope JH, Aufderheide TP, Ruthazer R, et al. Missed diagnoses of acute cardiac ischemia in the emergency department. N Engl J Med. 2000;342:1163-1170.
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♥ Watch this 22-minute documentary called “A Typical Heart“, a remarkable Canadian film about the deadly disparity between male and female heart disease, as experienced through the lens of healthcare professionals, researchers, patients and their families (NOTE: I was one of the eight Canadian heart patients interviewed).
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Heart Sisters 