Opening My Heart Read Online Free PDF

perfectly describes some doctors’ detached, scientific stance. Whatever they offer in the way of comfort or encouragement is appreciated, but nurses are in a position to offer emotional support more intimately, consistently, and around the clock. (Whether they do so or not is another matter. We all know of cases when a nurse’s anticipated Tender Loving Care turned out to be a Total Lack of Concern.) I guess I tend to cut doctors more slack about their BBM because they aren’t usually at the bedside all that much. In the hospital, doctors typically spend a few minutes with each patient during the day (if at all) and rarely at night. It’s nurses’ bedside manner that is going to make it or break it for a patient.
    By late afternoon, anxiety has overtaken me. My mind is spinning out of control, conjuring up more and more things to worry about. Frantically, I call Mary again.
    “I’d be the same way,” Mary says, “any nurse would.”
    By day and by night, I surf the net. Serendipitously, I discover that my obsessive behaviour is a diagnosis itself: cyberchrondria. I have decided to apply a few filters to my searches to avoid ramping up my terror more than necessary. I’ll stick with reputable, evidence-based websites, and as for personal accounts, I won’t read tales of fatal errors and screwups, botched jobs, horror stories of misdiagnosis and malpractice. I am able to interpret what I read, but what if I couldn’t? A hockey mom on Max’s team told me that after searching “heartburn” she diagnosed herself with acid reflux disease. When she went to her doctor, he said her upset stomach was a side-effect of an antibiotic she was on. A little knowledge can be a misleading, if not, in fact, a dangerous, thing.
    Internet-surfing madness can take over if you don’t use the information you glean judiciously. You have to make sure not to disproportionately emphasize some facts and overlook others.You have to be able to glide appropriately from the general to the specific, from the theoretical to the concrete, and back again. Time and again, I have seen patients fall into these traps because they don’t how to process certain information and understand how it relates to their specific situation.
    But thankfully the days are long gone when doctors had the monopoly on information and were thought to own the knowledge and have all the “answers.” Most doctors want to collaborate with patients, to forge a partnership, but too many patients confront doctors with bits of information, demands for tests or procedures, or raise objections to doctors’ advice based on partial or inaccurate knowledge gleaned from the Internet. I’m going to try not to make this same mistake myself.
    The first thing I learn in my Internet search is a loud wake-up call: heart disease, including coronary artery disease and other diseases related to the heart (such as valve problems), is the leading cause of death in North America. I am not alone.
    Next, I review the heart’s anatomy, its conduction system, and structures such as the arteries that supply its blood flow and the valves that control it. The aortic valve is one of four, in addition to the mitral, tricuspid, and pulmonic, and is positioned in between the left ventricle of the heart and the aorta, which sends oxygenated blood to the rest of the body, including the brain. Many people (1 per cent to 3 per cent in the sixty-five to seventy-five age group) develop calcified aortic valve stenosis (or narrowing) over time, but the most common congenital heart abnormality is exactly what I have – a bicuspid aortic valve. A normal aortic valve has three flaps, mine has only two. Over time, the irregularity becomes calcified, stiff, and constricted.
    Then, echoes of the pediatrician’s words: “Aortic stenosis carries a high risk of sudden cardiac death, especially when theejection fraction is less than 35 per cent.”
Mine is 30 per cent!
A normal ejection fraction is 50 per cent to