The Heart Attack Club, Part 1

Blog 7.  The Heart Attack Club, Part 1

   February is heart health awareness month so it might seem that I planned this blog as part of a plan to reinforce the fact that heart disease is a bigger killer than all the cancers put together.  Sadly, that isn't the case. Nor am I going to remind everyone (again) that there are a lot scarier things you should be worrying about than Ebola.
   The truth is, I've been trying to write about this particular issue for at least six months but the words wouldn't come. Sure, I had a very personal interest. I was the proud owner of my first vascular stint in a coronary artery. I had high blood pressure (but controlled it with meds, I reasoned).  I've always said, if you have to have something, heart disease is a good choice because we've made great progress in treating it. My odd tongue-tiedness wasn't even related to my usual skepticism that any of us in the health professions knows all that much about anything. I wasn't even quiet because I hadn't had a chance to study everything I could find to give me insight into the cause and treatment of my disease. Nor was it related to the rampant conflict of opinion on both of these subjects.
   Even my own providers disagreed about what I should or shouldn't do, eat or take. I'm  a believer in second opinions and I got them. Also third and fourth opinions.  No one agreed. It wasn't any of these things that contributed to my unusual resistance to sharing all my health trials and tribulations. (I am a female of a certain age,after all,  and we do love to talk about such things.)
   No, the real issue was that despite all the evidence in my medical chart, one brother's sudden death and the other brother's recent stroke, a few other known risk factors and some symptoms, I still couldn't believe this was happening to ME.
   To elaborate, I lead a "healthy" life. I work out. I don't smoke. I eat good whole food, but not too much. My BMI (Body Mass Index) is right on target. My waist is smaller than my hips. My HDL's are great. (That's the high density lipoprotein that is supposed to be protective against those nasty plaques that form in the blood vessels.} Most of the time, my LDL's are in range.  (LDL's are  pesky 'bad cholesterol' molecules that get us into trouble.)  Neither of my parents had heart disease, nor did my maternal grandmother.  I'm a woman, for goodness sake, and everybody knows we're protected, right?  Even my personal doctor seemed surprised.
   I'm not alone in subscribing to the "it-won't-happen-to me" myth, of course. (It not only can, but already had--I just hadn't noticed.)  The truth I hid from myself is that I had been experiencing symptoms long before I lost my brother, Mike, but, hey, they could have been related to--oh, I don't know-- lack of sleep, maybe a weird flu, arthritis, a pulled muscle, heart burn, horoscopes, karma, neurosis, unconscious desires never to have to wear spandex again, and so on. You get the picture. We all have capacity for denial but nurses seem to have been given a Claim-jumper's Restaurant portion.
Hopefully, you will be a little more receptive to reality. Here are the facts:

• While 1 in 31 American women will die from breast cancer each year, 1 in 3 will die from heart disease.
• Only 1 in 5 of women believe that heart disease is the greatest threat to our health.    43 million of us are affected. 
• An astounding 90% of us have one or more risk factors for developing heart disease.
• Since 1984, more women than men have died each year from heart disease.
• The symptoms of heart disease can be very different in women than in men. 
• If you have a 'first degree relative' with cardio-vascular disease, you should start seriously considering modifying your life style ten years before that relative had symptoms. 
• Every sixty seconds someone in the U.S. dies from a heart-disease related event. 
• Coronary heart disease alone costs the United States $108.9 billion each year. (health care services, medications, lost productivity.)

   Yes, heart disease should have been somewhere in my radar, but it came as an unwelcome shock. Consequently and without much trouble, I procrastinated consideration of treatment beyond a depressing number of prescription medications, all of which have an equally impressive number of side effects. That was, I denied everything until one of my sons arranged for a body scan. (I won't go into the pros and cons of body scans right now. We'll save that for later. Suffice it to say that mine held some additional unwelcome surprises.)
After that, the head-in-the-sand approach wasn't an option. Dr. Harvey Eisenberg, the physician who interpreted and reviewed the scan with me, was the first to suggest Dr. Dean Ornish's program for reversing  heart disease. I'd read about it but wasn't keen on super strict diets. My reading had left doubt that cholesterol was even the problem (some say it isn't). A plant based diet didn't sound all that fun either. Besides, none of my M.D.'s had even asked me what I ate, let alone suggested I might improve on it. But as any of you heart attack survivors may have experienced, I also didn't like feeling like a walking time bomb. I'm very clear that death is not optional and I don't fear it, but loss of control leaves me quaking. (It's in The Nurse's  Unofficial  Job Requirement. Control is as much a part of our DNA as chocolate.)
   During a visit with my primary care physician where both of us felt frustrated with my abundance of initiative and my dirth of progress, he suggested I think about Dr. Ornish's program. There it was. Two people who seemed to know what was up were independently suggesting the same thing. When a door opens that wide, even my cynicism can't close it. So I read Ornish's books. Afterwards I applied to the only Ornish program I could find on the West Coast which is at the UCLA Medical Center.
    Mary Ellen, one of the RN's with the program called. "It's good news and bad news," she began.
   "How about we start with the good news?" I suggested.
   "The good news is that you qualify for the program."
   "And the bad news?"
   "The bad news is that you qualify for the program."
   "Is there any really good news?"
   "Medicare will pay for it."
   So my adventure began with what I lovingly now call my "heart attack club."
The saga continues in "Heart Attack Club, Part 2." But if your curiosity is raising your blood pressure, you can google Dr. Dean Ornish/Spectrum. It'll give you a basic 411. I'll be back in a day or two to give you the "Inside Edition." Until then, keep breathing...and maybe eat a few vegetables.