The Day I Made Peace with an Errant Organ

Here’s my theory: few health crises in life are as traumatic as surviving a cardiac event. I developed this theory while I was busy having my own heart attack in the spring of 2008.
For starters, heart attack symptoms often come out of the blue (in fact, almost two-thirds of women who die of coronary heart disease have no previous symptoms. Having a heart attack can feel so unimaginably terrifying that almost all of us try desperately to dismiss or deny cardiac symptoms. And according to a 2013 report published in Global Heart, the journal of the World Heart Federation, women are twice as likely to die within one year even if they do survive a heart attack compared to our male counterparts.

So if – and each of these is still, sadly, a great big fat IF for too many women – we survive the actual cardiac event, and if we are near a hospital that’s able to provide an experienced team of cardiologists/cardiovascular surgeons/cardiac nurses, and if we are correctly diagnosed, and if we receive timely and appropriate treatment, and if the resulting damage to our oxygen-deprived heart muscle is not too severe, we get to finally go home, safe and sound.
And that’s where the real trauma starts.  
Trauma fallout starts later on at home because so often, we are plunged immediately into a profoundly surreal LaLa Land state during the earliest days in hospital, post-cardiac event. A true yet weirdly hilarious example of this state is Jodi Jackson’s account of...

Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - August 6, 2014 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Chronic Conditions Consumer Health Care Patients Source Type: blogs