tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8854256187954072618.post6485370813077428598..comments2023-08-23T14:12:14.439-06:00Comments on The Skinny Bitch Chronicles: Reaction DifferencesAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10475792856446972983noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8854256187954072618.post-47189647487697768662014-03-27T21:13:04.271-06:002014-03-27T21:13:04.271-06:00Thanks Carolyn! I'd love to go to the WomenHea...Thanks Carolyn! I'd love to go to the WomenHeart Science & Leadership Sympoium For Women With Heart Disease someday! I'll have to look into how to make that happen! <br /><br />When I started doing my own research and I found that once you've had a heart attack you are at a much increased for a second I was stunned. I found you and Jen online and started reading so many other stories through your blogs. I still hardly thought the lifetime illness applied to me. Once again, that happens to other people! I did so well afterwards and I thought that I was kicking heart diseases butt. Then I had to go back to the cath lab because my stents were failing and I could hardly believe it when I was told I had barely escaped a second heart attack. This was when the true reality that this would be a lifelong disease hit me like a ton of bricks--8 months it took to really come to this realization. <br /><br />Dr. Parker is a very smart man! It is indeed a deeply wounding event!Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10475792856446972983noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8854256187954072618.post-78922058081321102652014-03-27T20:16:40.079-06:002014-03-27T20:16:40.079-06:00Hi Jodi and thanks for including a link to my '...Hi Jodi and thanks for including a link to my 'Heart Sisters' post about healthy privilege here. <br /><br />You bring up a number of very important points around the differences in reactions to a heart disease diagnosis. I had a similar reaction to yours when I arrived at Mayo Clinic five months after surviving my "widowmaker" heart attack to attend the WomenHeart Science & Leadership Symposium For Women With Heart Disease (highly recommended, by the way!!) Over breakfast at Mayo on our first morning, we did round-the-table introductions, and that's when I started freaking out (quietly of course!) <br /><br />For example, the women at my table were saying things like: "My name is ___ and I had my first heart attack in 2005, then my second heart attack and double bypass surgery in 2006, then one of my grafts failed in 2007 so I had three stents implanted, etc etc etc..." <br /><br />I was stunned! Like you, I figured that for me, this had been a one-shot trauma, whew glad that's over with, now let's just get on with it.... Instead, I learned firsthand that heart disease is a chronic and progressive disease, and that our wonderful docs can bypass us, and stent us, and zap our wonky electrical circuits or do other procedures to help us survive, but nothing they do can address what originally damaged our delicate endothelial cells lining those coronary arteries - often years earlier. <br /><br />That's quite a shocking realization, and very unlike our experiences in acute care medicine.<br /><br />Once we get our brains wrapped around that truth, along with all the emotional and psychological and mental fallout such realizations inevitably bring, we can move on, as you so wisely say, and "settle in". <br /><br />As Dr. Stephen Parker, a cardiac psychologist and a heart attack survivor himself, likes to say: "A heart attack is a deeply wounding event, and it is a wound that takes a long time to recover from, whatever the treatment.”<br /><br />Keep up the great work here, Jodi!<br />regards,<br />C.Carolyn Thomashttp://www.myheartsisters.orgnoreply@blogger.com