Tara describes feeling 'aghast' that she had heart failure.
Transcript
I was whisked away to our local hospital cardiac unit and through a series of events I was discharged from ICU 10 days later. I went home not knowing I had heart failure, which may sound very silly, because I’m myself a nurse. But I got home and just thought that I was just going to take some time to get better. And I was in contact with my work, and I was consoling friends and family that I was going to be fine. And it was probably, people talked to me about my diet and how it would need to change. They talked to me about limitations I might have. They talked to me about all these things, that now in retrospect pointed towards a diagnosis of heart failure, but no one said it to me, or I didn’t hear it. So, my husband at one point, I overhead him telling somebody that I had heart failure. And I was aghast, I was like what? I have heart failure? I just thought that I’d had an event and that there wasn’t any lingering damage. But there was severe damage. And so, for many months I was really down and didn’t know where to go from there. And so, I’m a knowledge gatherer, so I got online to found out what I could find out about women like me, younger people going through heart failure. As I was 45 at the time.
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- Self-care – Maintaining Your Own Well-being – TaraTara finds volunteering and connecting with others very fulfilling.
- Finding Information & Cardiac Rehab – TaraTara 'felt unseen' in a cardiac rehab program, until she located a specific SCAD program.
- Reflections on Identity, Life and Death – TaraTara talks about the difficulty of having conversations with younger children.
- Diagnosis – TaraTara describes feeling 'aghast' that she had heart failure.
- Impact on Work, School, Finances – TaraTara talks about choosing between a job she loved and having enough money for herself and family.
- Backstories – TaraTara talks about having a spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD - a tear in the wall of a heart artery), not knowing that she had heart failure.
- Advice for Healthcare Providers – TaraTara describes how a nurse sitting with her was 'life altering'.
- Advice for Healthcare Providers – TaraTara speaks to the desire to share information and collaborate with healthcare providers.