Heart Health Awareness
Ok, ok. This isn’t going to just be about heart health awareness. Is it important? Absolutely. Many individuals are out there walking around with high blood pressure, very high cholesterol (not all cholesterol is the same or bad), and are metabolically ill with no goal of ever taking control over it. The best and worst parts of our bodies are that they are adaptable, and you can’t feel when it is adapting to the many insults we inflict upon them, through poor diet, alcohol consumption, no exercise, smoking, and poor sleep. Total health is not cardiac exclusive, and it certainly doesn’t end there. I am all for heart health awareness; everyone should know their hs-CRP and lipid panel, what those numbers mean, and why each individual has those numbers. However, this post will be about something a little deeper.
I have worked in an ICU environment for 6 years. Between 2021 and 2022, I was fortunate enough to work in a unit that served patients with advanced cardiac or lung disease, which was addressed by the implantation of assistive devices, ECMO support, or eventual transplant. I learned quickly that the nurses, doctors, and nurse practitioners who worked on this unit were the best. I was introduced to concepts I never knew existed, and they all had a deeper understanding of how the heart works and how to treat and fix them. But I also came to terms with the fact that I no longer found joy in keeping people alive in a manner where quality of life was significantly reduced. A great deal of good and amazing things were done for people who otherwise had no chance of living. I just realized that my purpose in life was to keep people away from this. I am fully aware that there are circumstances where emergency medicine and technology are unavoidable and necessary. But I knew that my purpose wasn’t to be a permanent fixture in this world and that I learned just enough to know that I was not meant to stay there.
The lightbulb went off, and I saw the connection between the heart and the brain. Not physically, but figuratively. We think and reason with our brains, but we say we feel it in our hearts. When we are grieving, we often refer to our hearts being broken. But it is utterly impossible. Or is it? When we experience emotional pain, oftentimes, our bodies are going through a rapid shift in functional status. Overall, we are homeostatic and when provoked, we progress to excessively stressed, which increases inflammation in the body, causing a response to help reverse it. Our bodies do this so quickly, but some individuals live in a constant state of this, causing systemic damage. Have you ever been almost hit by a driver and panicked but then quickly refocused because you still have to keep driving? What about when something tragic strikes, like the loss of a loved one, or a break-up with a partner? What do you do? Do you bury it and keep going or do you actually deal with it? We are all different, and we react differently but the one thing that is not different to each of us is that stress and grief hurts our hearts and brains. It doesn’t matter how strong you are or how emotionless you are. No one is off-limits from this, and is one of the biggest commonalities in chronic disease. Not the stressor itself but the damage that stress causes to the body. Just think about it. After long periods of stress, oftentimes, they lead to illness or maybe even an injury. Perhaps, if you were to get labs done, there would be a steep increase in your hs-CRP. This is speculative, and I have no proof of this. But it makes sense; when we are stressed, and our brains are just on overdrive, we can’t sleep, we don’t eat well, and we may not exercise. This is the time when all of these things would help us the most, but we do them the least. To top it all off, we may reach for alcohol, which is like adding gasoline to a fire that is going on in your circulatory system.
Ultimately, to take care of your heart means also to take care of your brain. But how do we do that? This is where it is different for everyone. I knew when I saw people repeatedly dying in the ICU during a pandemic that this was not for me anymore. There were not only people who knew nothing about medicine or who worked in healthcare who said what I was seeing was a lie, but I knew that my heart couldn’t take seeing people die all the time or being kept alive when their spirit was already gone. I am thankful for my experience, knowledge, and critical thinking skills. But to take care of my heart and brain, I had to reevaluate my life’s purpose. My goal and purpose will be to empower people with knowledge and an understanding of their health. This does not mean I will expect every patient to take perfect care of themselves and never enjoy life. This means I want to build a partnership with people to teach them what their labs mean and how what they do (or don’t do) affects them. I want to unlock the doors to people’s stress relief plans. This makes my heart and brain happy.
