After her husband’s heart attack, Madhu’s family members had to change their lifestyles. She found it difficult to assess her husband’s symptoms.

Transcript

My education was only through my doctor. But they told me how to take care. “Life,” he said, “well your lifestyle will be very different”, and certain medication he has to take which he never had before—also taking care of the food or lifestyle. I think those days especially, they advised me [to] cut down all the fats in your food, and salt, and sugar, and all kind of stuff, which was new all of a sudden because we never had any such problem. But this was a serious matter […] after heart attack. He was 3 weeks in hospital, and when he came home, it was kind of a difficult time because I didn’t know what to do, how to take care [of him]. But, I heard that he should not be getting any exciting news to excite him or worry him. So this becomes really hard with the kids when you cannot even talk. Anything that you want to share, which might affect him, might deteriorate the situation. I think now the heart attack patients are different, but those days the situation was really different. We were told not to talk [about] this, not to talk [about] that. All of a sudden you are not [only] taking care of the patient, but also the children just by yourself. We were not [even] telling [him] if the children [had] some problem in school. […]Raising teenagers, you have to do all that yourself. But slowly you learn it was fear. [The] first few nights, I could not sleep when he came back home, [because I was worried] that something might happen. So it was [a] very scary situation. I didn’t know what situation is really […] most serious, and because [he would] get some kind of pain and chest pain [although] they didn’t do a surgery that time. So, you don’t know at what time, what is the more serious, [and] what is a less serious. So, [when] any little thing happened, I was calling the doctor, [or more often] taking him to the hospital. But then you learn that these symptoms are not as serious. Making the decision, which [symptoms] are serious, and which are not serious was a big responsibility on me.

---

Go back