Enemy of Entropy

Oh. That Would Do It! (That Problem With Posting to LJ)

8 March 2010, 11:31 pm. No Comments. Filed under Blogging.

I’ve tried all the dif­fer­ent plu­g­ins that claim to work with Word­Press for cross-​​posting to Live­Jour­nal, but recently I’ve got­ten errors from every­thing. I’ve asked for help from the authors in their forums and noth­ing seemed to be hap­pen­ing. And then I saw this: Banned Because of Live+Press’ Bad Behav­ior. That’s from the cur­rent main­tainer of Live+Press, the plu­gin I’ve had the best luck with over­all. Read on…

Female Heart Attacks Are Different: A Nurse’s Heart Attack Experience

8 March 2010, 8:30 am. No Comments. Filed under Health.

The fol­low­ing was posted to a mail­ing list I’m on. Of course, it was sur­rounded with the usual “send it to every­body you know!” admo­ni­tions. I don’t do that, and I usu­ally delete any­thing so marked. But I did find the infor­ma­tion use­ful, so (after edit­ing a bit, I admit), I am repost­ing it. I made no mate­r­ial changes, and take no credit for the infor­ma­tion therein. I’d be happy to give credit to the orig­i­nal author if I can find any cred­itable attribution.

I did, of course, check Snopes, where I found that this thing has been cir­cu­lat­ing since 2007 and orig­i­nally con­tained more specifics about the sender, such as the date of the heart attack and her job title. The one I received claimed that the author was an emer­gency room nurse, which isn’t, appar­ently, the case (or if it is, wasn’t the claim in ear­lier ver­sions of the mes­sage). Still, there was no author given, and the infor­ma­tion I’m repeat­ing here was ver­i­fied as cred­i­ble. It does, how­ever, point out that heart attacks aren’t really gen­der spe­cific. While women are a lit­tle more likely than men to have “atyp­i­cal” heart attack symp­toms, peo­ple of any gen­der can have any kind of symptoms.

Did you know that women rarely have the same dra­matic symp­toms that men have when expe­ri­enc­ing a heart attack (Myocar­dial Infarc­tion — MI)? …you know, the sud­den stab­bing pain in the chest, pain on the left arm, the cold sweat, grab­bing the chest, and drop­ping to the floor.

I had a heart attack at about 10:30 p.m. with NO prior exer­tion and NO prior emo­tional trauma that one would sus­pect might’ve brought it on.

I was sit­ting all snugly and warm on a cold evening, purring cat on my lap, read­ing an inter­est­ing story and actu­ally think­ing, A-​​A-​​h, this is the life. I was all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up.

A moment later, I felt that awful sen­sa­tion of indi­ges­tion, when you’ve been in a hurry, grabbed a bite of sand­wich and washed it down with a dash of water, then that hur­ried bite feels like you’ve swal­lowed a golf ball oh-​​so-​​slowly going down the esoph­a­gus — most uncom­fort­able! You real­ize you shouldn’t have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thor­oughly and this time drink a glass of water to has­ten its progress down to the stom­ach. This was my ini­tial sen­sa­tion — the only trou­ble was that I hadn’t taken a bite of any­thing since about 5 p.m.

After it seemed to sub­side, the next sen­sa­tion was like lit­tle squeez­ing motions that seemed to be rac­ing up my spine (hind­sight: it was prob­a­bly my aorta spas­ming), gain­ing speed as they con­tin­ued rac­ing up and under my ster­num (breast bone).

Then they con­tin­ued into my throat and branched out into both jaws. Aha! Now I stopped puz­zling out what was hap­pen­ing — we’ve all read and/​or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the sig­nals of an MI. I said aloud to my cat, “Dear God, I think I’m hav­ing a heart attack!”

I low­ered the footrest, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, “If this is a heart attack, I shouldn’t be walk­ing into the next room where the phone is — on the other hand, if I don’t, nobody will know I need help, and if I wait I may not be able to get up at all.”

I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed 911. I told the oper­a­tor I thought I was hav­ing a heart attack due to the pres­sure build­ing under my ster­num and radi­at­ing into my jaws. I wasn’t hys­ter­i­cal or afraid, just stated the facts calmly. She said she will send the para­medics over imme­di­ately, but to unbolt the door and lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in.

I did as instructed and lost con­scious­ness. I don’t remem­ber the medics com­ing in, exam­in­ing me, lift­ing me onto a gur­ney, get­ting me into the ambu­lance nor hear­ing their call to St. Jude’s emer­gency room. I briefly awak­ened when we arrived and saw the car­di­ol­o­gist help­ing the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambu­lance and ask me ques­tions, but I couldn’t make my mind inter­pret what he was say­ing or form an answer. I nod­ded off again and didn’t wake up until the car­di­ol­o­gist and his part­ner had already threaded the angiogram bal­loon up into my heart where they installed stents to hold my right coro­nary artery open.

My think­ing and actions at home before call­ing 911 took about 4 – 5 min­utes, both the fire sta­tion and St. Jude are only min­utes away from my home, and my car­di­ol­o­gist was already on his way.

Why so much detail? Because I want all of you to know what I learned first hand:

  1. Be aware when some­thing very dif­fer­ent is hap­pen­ing in your body — not the usual men’s symp­toms — but things I couldn’t explain until my ster­num and jaws got into the act. Many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn’t know they were hav­ing one. They com­monly mis­take it as indi­ges­tion, take Maalox or other anti-​​heartburn prepa­ra­tion and go to bed, hop­ing they’ll feel bet­ter in the morn­ing when they wake up … which doesn’t hap­pen. Your symp­toms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call 911 if any­thing unpleas­ant is hap­pen­ing that you’ve not felt before. It is bet­ter to have a “false alarm” than to risk your life guess­ing what it might be!

  2. Note that I said Call 911. Time is of the essence!
    • Do not try to drive your­self to the ER — you are a haz­ard to oth­ers on the road.

    • Do not have your pan­icked fam­ily speed­ing who — instead of focus­ing on the the road — are look­ing anx­iously at what’s hap­pen­ing with you.

    • Do not call your doc­tor — he doesn’t know where you live and if it’s at night you won’t reach him any­way; and if it’s day­time, his assis­tants (or answer­ing ser­vice) will tell you to call 911. He doesn’t carry equip­ment in his car that you need to be saved! Para­medics do, prin­ci­pally oxy­gen that you need ASAP. Your doc­tor will be noti­fied later.

  3. After you call 911, take an aspirin if you can.

  4. Don’t assume it couldn’t be a heart attack because you have a nor­mal cho­les­terol count and have had no pre­vi­ous symp­toms. Research shows that an ele­vated cho­les­terol is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it’s unbe­liev­ably high and/​or accom­pa­nied by high blood pres­sure). MIs are usu­ally caused by long-​​term stress and inflam­ma­tion (from infec­tions) in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hor­mones into your sys­tem to sludge things up in there.

  5. Remem­ber that pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep!

Let’s be care­ful and be aware. The more we know, the bet­ter our chances of survival!

Review: Walking Dead by C.E. Murphy

7 March 2010, 11:00 am. No Comments. Filed under Reading.

Walking Dead (Walker Papers, #4) Walk­ing Dead by C.E. Mur­phy


My rat­ing: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve enjoyed the other Walker Papers nov­els, but Walk­ing Dead def­i­nitely showed more depth and matu­rity than the ear­lier vol­umes. Both the author and her lead char­ac­ter have grown very nicely. Joanne is far from per­fect, but she doesn’t make the same mis­takes over and over again, which is a pet peeve of mine and occurs all too often in some other authors works. (There’s con­sis­tency, and then there’s refus­ing to learn from mis­takes to the extent that I have to believe that a char­ac­ter is too stu­pid to live.) As for the author, it’s incred­i­bly refresh­ing to read a series that does not fall into the all-​​too-​​familiar para­nor­mal romance formula!

Another thing I enjoy about this series is that hero­ine Joanne has a sup­port­ing ensem­ble of friends and cowork­ers who have their own tal­ents and foibles, includ­ing a delight­ful mar­ried cou­ple, a sexy father fig­ure (who isn’t related to any­one we’ve met so far), and an even sex­ier boss. This time around we were treated to the return of a char­ac­ter Joanne res­cued in an ear­lier vol­ume who has grown into some of her own ass-​​kicking abilities.

There is a thread that ties all of the Walker Papers together, but C.E. Mur­phy is keep­ing things fresh enough that I, at least, am not get­ting bored. I would, how­ever, cau­tion that this is a series that is best read com­pletely and in order. I began read­ing one of the nov­els with­out real­iz­ing that there had been a novella pub­lished between it and the pre­vi­ous one, and found myself well and truly con­fused. Walk­ing Dead def­i­nitely is not a good start­ing point for the series! While a new reader wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily be com­pletely lost, she would miss far too many details to get all the juice out of this book.

View all my reviews »

Updated Page — Fat Stuff

7 March 2010, 9:59 am. No Comments. Filed under Blogging.

Cur­rent Mood:Happy emoticon Happy

I updated the Warn­ing: Fat Lady Ahead page (finally!) today. The resources page had to be split into a sep­a­rate page.

Maybe It Isn’t the Flu

6 March 2010, 11:50 pm. No Comments. Filed under Family, Fun, Health, Reading, Relationships.

Katie seems to be feel­ing a bit bet­ter. She slept through most of the day, and just got up a few min­utes ago (right at the end of my and Sam’s date) feel­ing like she could eat some­thing. Solid food, even! That’s progress. Since she didn’t have any antivi­rals, I don’t think this was really the flu. She should still be much sicker if it was. I’m not at all unhappy about that. Read on…

 

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