The Power of Positive Choices

For people with heart disease or some other major illness, the initial diagnosis may be a shock. You may wonder, “How did I get this?” or “Why me?” Many of us ask these questions. Some of us go on for days, months, and years wallowing in self pity.

It’s not easy to see the bright side of a bad situation, but we should do all that we can to stay positive – even when a diagnosis seems grim. Why should we stay positive? Because a positive attitude is the secret to a rapid recovery.

How many times have you heard someone say, “She’s lost the will to live.” Sure enough, in a short time frame, that person either dies or becomes sicker. Studies have shown that the mind is so powerful, it can actually contribute to a person’s illness. The mind is also so powerful, that it can contribute to a person’s health.

Think about depression for a moment. I remember that time in my life very clearly. I literally stopped functioning. It was difficult to get out of bed in the morning. I lost my appetite and lost weight I didn’t want to lose. I couldn’t do simple tasks around the house, like cooking or cleaning, and I couldn’t concentrate at work. All that ran through my mind was fear about what would happen in the future or anxiety of what happened in the past. Sometimes medication and counseling helps, and sometimes you need to change some circumstances in your life before you can step out of the muck of negative thinking.

So, how do we get ourselves out of the cycle of negativity? One way is to remember we always have a choice. We don’t have to be stuck in a bad situation for the rest of our lives. Try to remember that life is like a roller coaster. Sometimes circumstances are headed upward and other times they are plunging down at 60 m.p.h.

If you are having a hard time thinking about the choices you have available to you, here are some suggestions:
– Don’t deny your feelings by going on as if nothing has happened to you. If you had a heart attack or triple bypass surgery, say to yourself, “Okay, I just took a dip on the roller coaster of life. Now where do I go from here?”
– Seek the advice of medical professionals and family members. If you are unhappy with your current doctor, get a second opinion or change doctors.
– If your life isn’t in immediate danger, give yourself a day or two to think about your options. Do you need surgery or can your condition be managed with medication? Take some time to be alone or spend time with family discussing the options without outside distractions.
– Write down your thoughts. If you’ve just learned that you have heart disease and the doctors are throwing terms at you that you don’t understand, write them down and look them up on the Internet or ask for an explanation.
– If you are too emotional and can’t remember what the doctor is telling you, ask a relative or friend to accompany you to your appointment or take a tape recorder and record the conversation.

When I know I have choices, I feel more in control of my life. I know how easy it is to panic. Your mind starts racing through the worst possible scenarios. But when you get a devastating diagnosis, try to remember to breathe. Then ask yourself, “What are my choices?” It just might give you a little more peace of mind. And, with peace of mind comes a more positive attitude and a quicker recovery.

Teachers Along the Path of Life

If you look back on your life, you will soon come to realize that you are not alone in this world. Teachers, in one form or another, are there to guide you. When you were first born, your parents were your teachers. As you reached the age of five, you were sent to school and were assigned teachers who taught you how to read, write, add, subtract, multiply, and divide. You learned geography, history, and art. Most of you managed to graduate from high school. Some have gone off to college and graduate school and expanded your education in other subjects.

But education isn’t always formal schooling. Throughout our lives, no matter what our age, we continue to learn to live in this world and we continue to meet teachers along the way. This is especially true when we’ve faced heart disease or some other major illness. In order to survive, we must learn new skills, eliminate bad habits, and move forward. Sometimes our teachers are not even aware that they are teaching us new skills.

Yesterday was my the year anniversary of my heart attack. This wasn’t a special day of celebration for me. It was filled with lots of daily routine stuff. I practiced yoga, took my mother’s cat to the vet, picked up cat supplies from the store, removed nail polish from my mother’s fingernails, delivered medications to the nurse, visited with a friend, and attended a pot luck dinner. But with each of these activities, I learned something along the way.

Before my yoga practice, I was reminded about how easily I could fall back into a stressful lifestyle simply by thinking about something. The topic of my thoughts ran along the lines of: How would I be able to tell my mother she couldn’t keep her cat anymore.

Over the past several months, I’ve learned that she was feeding her cat chocolate chip cookies. That may sound harmless, but she was making the cat sick. The cat has an allergic reaction to cookies and breaks out in sores all around his face. Since my mother has Alzheimer’s she either denies or can’t remember ever feeding the cat cookies. I know she loves her cat and it would be traumatic for her to give up the cat, so I started worrying about “What if” before I even met with the vet to discuss the situation.

My husband reminded me to do my yoga practice. During my practice, I reminded myself that stress doesn’t need to be a major player in my life. I can control it by breathing slowly and evenly, and focusing on the present moment instead of worrying about what might happen in the future.

At the vet, I learned that the allergic reaction might be caused from something else in the cat’s environment. The cat was given a shot and medication. The vet, a dear friend of mine, said that if or when the time came for my mother to give up her cat, he would help me find a good home for her beloved pet, but he didn’t think we needed to remove the cat at this time. Ahh.

Visiting my mother, I learned patience. Explaining the health issues of her cat was a delicate balance between laying out the facts, reminding her not to feed the cat human food of any kind, and keeping my tone of voice kind and caring so as not to agitate her.

My dear friend taught me the importance of taking time to share your life with others. Taking time to relax, put your feet up, drink a cup of tea, and smile.

My Scripps friends at the pot luck dinner were teachers, too. We share a special bond. These are the men and women who attended the lifestyle change program with me. We’ve become very close, sharing our most heart wrenching secrets through group support during the program and now keeping one another informed about or lives during our monthly pot lucks. They helped me celebrate my one year anniversary and reminded me of the courage and determination it takes to pull yourself out of the depths of despair and to learn to be healthy, happy and peaceful.

With heartfelt gratitude to all my teachers, family and friends. Thank you.

True Independence is Letting Go of Expectations

Are we truly independent on this Independence Day? I learned a lesson from nature this morning. I woke up early and drove to a nearby war memorial at the top of Mt. Soledad to pray for peace. The air was moist from dense early morning fog. I could barely see 20 feet in front me as I drove away from my house. I wake up early most mornings and do the same, hoping to see a glorious sunrise over the distant Cuyamaca Mountains. As I drove through the dense fog, I expected today was not going to be one of those days.

Fifty feet before the turn into Mt. Soledad National Park, the fog cleared. I was above the clouds. It felt like heaven. Below me was nothing but gray, the entire city of San Diego shrouded in gloomy fog. But the sight before my eyes was pure joy. The sun was rising in the distance. Occasionally a thin cloud would drift by, trying to obscure the sun’s rays, but the bright ball of fire burned through and showered its light onto the Earth. How absolutely spectacular. And totally unexpected.

It’s interesting how when we set up expectations, we are also setting ourselves up for disappointments. It has been close to a month that I’ve been waking up early in hopes of seeing the sun rise, and each day feeling disappointed by what San Diegans refer to as June gloom.

How many times during the day do we expect something to happen and get disappointed when it doesn’t go our way? How many times do we expect others to behave in a certain manner and get disappointed when they don’t? How can we live our lives without expectations?

In my mind, I know the answer, yet in practicality I sometimes forget. Living without expectations is living in the present moment. Not thinking about what is going to happen in the future and not fretting over what has happened in the past. Living in the now.

So on this July 4th, let us all be independent and live without expectations.

Is it Right or Is it Easy?

Since my heart attack, I’ve shifted a lot of my thinking. I used to live each day by what I thought is right or wrong or by what is good or bad. Judgments and guilt played a heavy toll.

Religions have their commandments, bylaws, or rules to follow. But I’ve come to the conclusion that good vs. bad or right vs. wrong isn’t the best way to keep humans on the straight and narrow. I believe that everyone in this world is good. Maybe our actions aren’t always what others might think are good, so they label a person bad. But being bad or wrong carries so much judgment and guilt, that it’s time to rethink how we perceive ourselves and others.

I’d like to propose a change to: Is it right or is it easy?

If you’re human and have love in your heart, it’s probably not hard to do good things for yourself, your family, and your friends. It’s equally probable that you’re not going to spend your day intentionally hurting others. But when it comes to our actions, it’s much harder to make the distinction between doing something that is right and something that is easy. You can think about asking this question with everything in your life.

Say, for example that you are trying to watch your weight, and keep your cholesterol and blood pressure low. You’re under a lot of stress at work. It’s noon, and your hungry. You forgot to pack a lunch and have only 30 minutes to eat, swing by the cleaners, pick up your child from kindergarten and take her to the sitter. Do you skip lunch? Maybe you swing by McDonalds or Burger King and order a burger, fries and soft drink and tell yourself you’ll eat a light dinner. You need to nourish your body. But you also have all these other responsibilities. What do you do?

Here’s another example: You just got back the results of your bone scan. You have osteoporosis. You need to strengthen your bones. You’re already on Fosomax, so the only thing left to do is weight bearing exercise – every day. You start out with good intentions – planning to walk 30 minutes after you drop your son off at school. The first week you get into a routine and everything seems to be working on schedule. Then your son gets sick. You stay home and don’t exercise for a day or two. Your son recovers and returns to school, but instead of walking, other things creep into your schedule. You tell yourself you’ll exercise later, but later never comes. You fall back into your old habits. Most of us don’t think about the consequences of our actions until it’s too late.

It’s easy to blame ourselves and others for situations in our life, but ultimately we are responsible for our own actions, so the next time you have to make a choice, do you choose what is easy or what is right?

Pearls of Wisdom from my Support Group

After my heart attack, I knew I would be going through rehab to get back my physical strength, but little did I know that there was so much more to learn. Even after my official 12 week program, I was continually drawn back to my weekly support group meetings. What resonates in my heart today are three pearls of wisdom I heard from others with heart disease in my support group.

The first pearl of wisdom is: There is no round trip in life.

It’s a one-way ticket all the way. Recently there has been a discussion on Women Heart about “the other side.” It is an intriguing read about women who have flat lined. There are many accounts and books written about life after death. Religions profess about heaven and hell. Some religions believe that a soul reincarnates into another being. Many of us fear death. Some of us have dealt with our own demons and have written our wills or prepaid for our own funerals. But for me, I’d like to modify this pearl of wisdom to: My physical body has a one way ticket on this Earth.

The second pearl of wisdom is: Life is not a dress rehearsal.

I think back to the plays and ballet recitals of my youth. I would practice my lines until my mother got tired of hearing them or I’d stretch my legs against the wall until I could do a perfect split. I was so excited about my costumes too, trying them on when no one was looking and pretending that I was a professional performer. Then the big day would come. The preparations to that point took months, but the performance was over in an hour or two.

But in life, you don’t get to do “do overs.” All we get is today, this moment, to do the best that we can with whatever skills we have. Yet for most of my life, I regretted the past with lots of “Why did I…s” and feared the future with “What if …s”. I don’t think I’m alone in this either. As women we beat ourselves up and lose our self-esteem. Then hopefully one day we wake up and start living in the present, because that is all we have. Today. So live your life as if there is no tomorrow. Enjoy and celebrate each moment with gusto.

I’d like to think that I’ve saved the best pearl of wisdom for last: Is this worth dying for?

Slap me along side the head with this one. If you ever need to question the wisdom of choice, this is the question to remember. Every time I get annoyed about something and feel my blood pressure rise or my breath become shallow, I take a deep breath and remember this pearl. Negative emotions can dramatically affect someone with heart disease, so these days I try to stay as calm as possible.

This question works wonders when it comes to diet too. Every time I walk into Starbucks and read their chalkboard special drink of the day such as raspberry mocha with whipped cream or gaze into their glass display case filled with delicious looking chocolate delights, I now ask myself, “Is this worth dying for?” The answer is pretty easy: NO. Then it’s easy for me to order a grandé soy decaf latte or a venté herbal tea.

As humans, we are blessed and cursed with a free will. We can choose good or bad foods, and advertisers do a bang up business trying to persuade us to visit MacDonalds, Jack-in-the-Box, Wendy’s or any other junk food restaurant. I don’t see many commercials on television promoting tofu, fresh fruit or steamed veggies, do you? We hear on the news about the obesity problem in children and adults in the US. I am sure advertising all kinds of junk food contributed to the problem, yet, we all have a free will. We can choose what we put into our mouths.

Dieting is one of the hardest things to do in our society. Even when we “go on” a diet, we soon lose our willpower and “go off” it, sometimes with a vengeance. But since weight is a contributing factor to heart disease, we must have some restraint and pay attention to what we put into our mouths. If you are having a hard time keeping those pounds at bay, join me in my food and negative emotion mantra – “Is this worth dying for?”

What are your favorite pearls of wisdom?

Complications & Simplicity of Life

As a couple starts a family, oftentimes they plunge ahead, not knowing or caring what life has in store for them. Who thinks about one day having open heart surgery or a heart attack? In today’s society, there is more divorce and broken homes where people struggle to survive. Single parents are faced with not only caring for themselves but also their children. Their incomes are lower, their expenses higher, and supervision of the children is less and less. What happens when that single parent succumbs to heart disease or cancer?

Nuclear families are disbursing to all parts of the country. Very few children have grandparents close by and many adults live long distances from their siblings and other family members. Who is available in the time of a crisis? Even cohesive families whether it be husband, wife and children or husband, wife, his children and her children, find it difficult to stay close. The father is working day and night, the mother very often needs to work as well, just to pay the mortgage. If the family can manage on one income, the mother finds herself swept up in the lives of the children – driving them to school, to baseball or soccer practice, swim team, after school lessons in piano, or tutoring in math or science. Nowadays parents are overworked and children are overscheduled. Throw a heart attack or some other major illness into the mix and its seems as if a bomb explodes.

No wonder people lose their sense of self or question their lives after heart surgery. There is no time to be alone and contemplate life.

In this age of technology and credit, even people who can’t afford to buy the latest LCD TV, MP3 player, computer, automobile or house can now buy them with no money down and extended payments. Lives in the US have become enmeshed in consumerism. Even television shows exemplify the trend with titles like “I Want That!” There is a never ending desire for more stuff and bigger houses. Sure that new car feels luxurious. It’s the latest model and newest car on the block. Everyone admires you for what you have rather than admiring you for who you are. Yet, possessions are temporary and so opposite to what makes a person happy on the inside.

It is especially hard for a woman who has recently had some traumatic event in her life. Your mind is preoccupied with doctor appointments, medications, and pain on top of worrying about all the other things that occupy your normal day. But at this time of healing, there is one thing to put at the top of your to do list.

Take some time out of your busy day and just be with yourself. This simple task can bring you back to your true self and happiness. It helps you slow down your life. I especially like to take some time alone in nature. I take deep breaths of clean fresh air and inhale the wonderful fragrances around me – the freshly mown grass, the sweet jasmine growing on the vine in the park, the salty ocean, the cool moist forest floor.

Taking time to play, especially during recovery can speed up the body’s ability to heal. So, go play. Whether that means taking a short walk along a side canyon, smelling the flowers in your neighborhood, floating down a calm river, swinging in your local park, or simply sitting quietly and listening to the sounds of nature.

When you are alone with nature, it’s like stepping into another world. A world of tranquility, abundance, solitude, peace. You begin to wonder about the greatness of God, whatever form that means for you. And you begin to forget about your illness and the fear that goes along with it. Take the time and use your senses to gaze at the magnificent world in which we live.

How My Lifestyle Contributed to My Heart Attack

It’s been close to 11 months since I’ve had my heart attack. A lot has changed in my life in that time. I’d like to share some of my thoughts and hope to hear how others have managed to move on with their lives after learning they have heart disease.

I always classified myself as a Type A personality. Always striving for perfection. From as early as I can remember, I competed against my sister for the best grades, the most friends, the cleanest room. When I turned eighteen, I worked at the local savings & loan and strived to be the best employee, yet others got the promotions. I became resentful. Life seemed so unfair. I moved on to other jobs, always running into similar situations. I’d bend over backwards doing my best, but my best was never good enough.

My personal life was much the same, striving to be liked or loved by others, yet feeling that I was never good enough. For years I blamed my circumstances on others. My father checked out when I was two. I never got to know him and resented him for abandoning me. My mother contributed to that resentment by always complaining that we lived in public housing because my father never gave her enough money to support us. Even though my mother worked, we often relied on the generosity of others.

I married young. When that marriage failed, I stopped going to church. I put myself through college and liked the independence, but depression set in. Depression caused from loneliness and loss of self. It took years of education and counseling to pull myself together.

Then I met a wonderful man, got married and had a child. Life was good. I turned into the perfect wife and mother. I worked full-time, cleaned the house, cooked the meals, volunteered at the school. By that time, I had gone to graduate school and was finishing my Ph.D. in Education.

Eventually, I fell back into the same patterns, giving of myself until I had nothing left to give. While I was happy working in academia and was acknowledged for my accomplishments, I neglected my body and my spirituality. I became my daughter’s mom, my husband’s wife and lost sight of me. As the years rolled by, my life began to spin out of control, and as any Type A personality could attest, control was the key to keeping my life in order.

My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and I became her sole caregiver. My daughter was off at college and we faced high tuition bills. My husband started a new job and our marriage became strained. Then the unthinkable happened. At the age of fifty-four, I had a heart attack. It seemed to come from out of the blue. Prior to that time, I thought I was a healthy woman. My body mass index (BMI) was in the normal range, I ate sensibly, drank alcohol in moderation, didn’t smoke, and exercised a couple times a week. I received annual checkups and my blood pressure and cholesterol were normal. At the time, I had no recollection of a family history of heart disease.

In reality, the stress, depression, and built up anger and resentment throughout my lifetime along with a family history of heart disease contributed to my heart attack. Once I began attending a twelve-week lifestyle change program at Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine, I realized that by neglecting my mind and spirit, my body paid a dear price. In addition to the lifestyle change program, I have gone deeper into my yoga practice. Never would I have guessed that this program and my journey deeper into yoga would make such a dramatic change in my life.