Thriving With Heart Disease A Unique Program for You and Your Family Live Happier, Healthier, Longer

Chapter One: Begin the Journey I am a cardiac psychologist. For nearly twenty-five years I have been helping people recover from heart disease by teaching them and their loved ones how to contend with the emotional ravages of the illness. This book is the fruit of countless hours I've spent with thousands of heart patients and their families -- men and women like you, with loved ones like yours. My message will knock your life back onto its feet because I'm going to tell you something about heart disease you may not have known before: it's not the severity of the illness but how you cope with it that will determine how long you will live and how happy you will be. Not only can you survive heart disease, you can actually thrive with it for many, many years. In fact, if you cope well and follow the advice I give you in this book, you can live as long as you would if you didn't have the illness.That's right: you can live as long as you would if you didn't have the illness. And you can lead a full and vibrant life, a life of challenge and discovery. You don't have to live like an invalid, propped up in a corner of the couch while your days diminish into a series of bland, limited routines. You don't have to tiptoe through your nights and days, anxious that a backfiring truck or a spin on the dance floor will throw you into the hospital with a heart attack. And you don't have to suffer from New Age guilt because you couldn't swallow the diet of the month or stick with the latest exercise fad.What you do have to do is acknowledge the gift you've received: the infinite bounty of a second chance. The fact that you are holding this book and reading these words confirms your place among the privileged, the lucky ones who got the wake-up call, resisted the urge to slam the snooze button, and chose to embark on the journey toward a newly conscious life. Because living with heart disease is a journey -- a journey forward toward the healthy life you were meant to live, not back to the one you were living when the illness struck. It's a journey you take one moment at a time -- breakfast by breakfast and conversation by conversation, embrace by embrace and, yes, conflict by conflict. It's a journey you'll be taking for the rest of your life -- which, I remind you, can be a long, long time -- and the people who love you the most get to come with you.That's the thing that astonishes so many of my patients: the degree to which their illness is a family affair. Heart disease can cause a seismic shift in even the most stable relationships, rattling a family's foundation and leaving its members shaky and grim. It's always unsettling but worst when the illness strikes without warning, which happens more often than you might think: All known cardiac risk factors combined account for only three out of four cases of heart illness -- the others are attributed to unknown causes.If you are like most heart patients, your notion of normal changed forever the instant heart disease invaded your world. Suddenly, nothing was the same for you or your family, and everything ended in a question mark: Am I going to die? Why did this happen to me? What happens now? How will we manage? Will things ever be the same?You all probably have had to deal with unfamiliar people (doctors, nurses, rehabilitation specialists, technicians), unfamiliar places (hospitals, waiting rooms), and unpleasant experiences (procedures, tests, surgery). How you manage these experiences -- as a patient and as a family -- will determine the quality of your life and how long you hold on to it. Thriving with heart disease isn't only about a muscle, it's also about how you manage your emotions, your attitude, and the intricate web of human connections, secure and tenuous, that bind you to the people you love and interact with.And thriving doesn't stopSotile, Wayne M. is the author of 'Thriving With Heart Disease A Unique Program for You and Your Family Live Happier, Healthier, Longer', published 2003 under ISBN 9780743243643 and ISBN 0743243641.