All 2025 Heart Sisters posts
JANUARY 2025
What if we call them “self-care promises” instead of resolutions?
Implantable cardiac defibrillator shocks vs. “careful and kind” end-of-life care
Negative vs. positive experiences: what you remember may depend on emotions
Coffee: good or bad for our hearts?
FEBRUARY – it’s HEART MONTH! ♥
Can mental muscle help us recuperate?
Which common medicine earned a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records?
Are physicians losing public trust?
MARCH 2025
How many heart patients get to the hospital by ambulance?
Do heart patients suffer more during a cold – or does it just feel that way?
Constructive wallowing after a serious diagnosis
Waiting, worrying and medical test results
This is much more than a hospital waiting room
APRIL 2025
Words that hurt: which ones should be deleted from medicine – and why?
Just because I can lift it, doesn’t mean it’s not heavy
In Medicine, the opposite of kindness is not cruelty. It’s dismissal.
The “not wonderful” new diagnosis I didn’t see coming
MAY 2025
A crowd, a crown, and a standing ovation
Questions heart patients should ask before getting an MRI scan
Connection instead of isolation: my waiting room experiment
Where are you on the Distress Thermometer?
JUNE 2025
When “Look on the bright side!” feels wrong
Signs & symptoms: are they the same thing?
Why patients resist asking for help
It’s not what you know, or who you know, but who knows YOU
JULY 2025
Optimistic, pessimistic or realistic: take your pick
Remember when food tasted like food?
AUGUST 2025
When the nursing staff forget about you
Clinical “noise” in medicine: it’s not what you think
How doctors (gradually) discovered that women have heart attacks, too
Guest post from Dr. Scott Lear! “Fact-checking Old Wives’ Tales”
SSSKS
♥
See the archives of 900+ previous HEART SISTERS posts from:
2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
♥
NOTE FROM CAROLYN: My blog-turned-book, A Woman’s Guide to Living with Heart Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press) reads like the “Best Of. . .” Heart Sisters articles since 2009. You can find it at your local library or favourite bookshop (please support your independent neighbourhood booksellers!) or at Amazon (paperback, hardcover or e-book). If you order it directly from Johns Hopkins University Press, you can save 30% off the list price by using their code HTWN.
September 2025
Old Wives’ Tales: Fact or Fiction
Patients, twisted thinking and cognitive distortion
Words Matter – especially in medicine
False hope vs. real hope for patients
October 2025
The havoc called breast cancer
Why you should not yell at cancer patients
NOVEMBER 2025
Everything happens for a reason – or does it?
Are you “managing” your worst symptoms?
Heart Sisters 