Anyone here with a family history of heart disease?

 

Hello.

I am in a similar situation. You may see me mentioning my parents but in fact, I’ve been raised by my aunt and uncle. I call them mom and dad cause I was too young when I lost my biological mother. I don’t remember her at all.

She died as a result of a heart disease in her 30s. Everyone says that the more I age the more I look like her. And frankly when hearing that I just hope that the looks s everything that I’m going to get from her.  

I read about the disease she had and it says that it can be inherited sometimes.

Well if I were you, I would definitely take good care of my life style. When you know that you are possibly more prone to get a heart disease than other people you must start taking actions in order to prevent it.

Sleep well, eat well. No junk food, no unhealthy fats. You should eat exclusively cooked meals, forget about fried.

And no stress. You have no idea about how much stress can affect your heart. So arrange your life in a way that it is relaxing rather than stressful. Even if that means changing your current job, love partner etc.

I have a great family history of heart disease on my father's side. His three sisters, his father and grandfather. I had my problem at approximately the same age as my father. Mine was 3 weeks before my 56th birthday his was in the summer of 53 and his birthday was in July but I don't know the exact date of his heart attack. My sister was skipped but her two sons both have it.

I can continue later but right now I must go to work.

 

 

Hello there. Unfortunately I have family with very long history of heart disease. My grandmother died when she was 42 from heart attack. My mom had three bypass surgeries and my dad had one silent heart attack.

My brother is diagnosed with arrhythmia and I also have a lot of problems with my heart.  But I can hear that a lot of people are having heart issues as well.

I don’t know what is going on, but I am glad because I have found this site where I can talk with you guys about this problem.

I am glad that I can share experience with you.

I had my bypass surgery 20 years ago on March 15th, since then I have been looking for any place on line where I could get more information about it and share experiences. Finally I did find a couple posts here in 2009 but not much since until now. I hope we can attract many more to share. As I said my father was just short of 56 when he had his heart attack and so was I. He was treated at the NH VA hospital so I wrote to them attempting to obtain the exact date he was there and any other information about what was done. The only thing they could supply was the date he was in a year later for a bronchial infection so I was not able to discern how close we were to being exactly the same age. He lived to a month short of his 80th birthday, a number I am hoping to beat by at least 20 years. My mother died at 102 so I think it may be possible as long as I can keep the heart attack gremlins at bay.

I did discover some very interesting facts in my search though. There was a famous heart researcher/surgeon Dr, Debakey, working for the VA in Houston at the time of my father's demise. Bypass surgery had not been invented yet but he was in the process of doing that in 1953. My father was always willing to show people the scar where he said they broke some of his ribs to get inside. Now if there was nothing they could do in there at the time why did someone go in there? I was only 13 at the time and had no interest in looking at those scars. How I wish I had looked now. Another part of his story was that as soon as he was transferred to the VA hospital they sent for a heart doctor. They flew him up here to NH from Houston in the back seat of a jet fighter. Reading stories about the good doctor, that sounds like something he would have done. I can't help wondering if my father might have been the first bypass patient he experimented on. He did live much longer than would be expected of a heart attack victim back then.

Yes, since I am a member of this site I am a little bit familiar with your issue and your heart diseases. I need to tell you that I really admire you because I can see your enthusiasm to help everyone, to help us because we don’t know a lot about those diseases.
Tell me how do you live now? How do you feel? When you are sick, is tis affecting your heart? Do you feel week? Can you use any medications to heal your current health issue since you are having so many heart problems?
My family has a lot of heart issues but we don’t know a lot about it. That is why I became part of this site – to learn and to hear other people experience.

I've been doing fine since the bypass surgery. I learned a lot about exercising in rehab and am not afraid to do whatever I feel like doing. I am only limited by what makes me tired at the time. I push myself to do things that many people used to think was not good for a heart attack victim. I would say the BP medicine probably causes more limits than the bypass did. Exercising is more difficult due to the effects of the BP meds. It makes warming up more necessary and exercising more difficult. I'm not talking about organized exercise like in a gym. I mean things I do for fun that require strenuous work like cutting and hauling wood and working on the rail line where we ride our rail cars. Cutting brush and keeping the tracks repaired. Cutting and removing trees that fall across the tracks. Cleaning out culverts that the beavers constantly plug up. In the winter when I shovel my driveway I work until I am breathing too hard to be comfortable then go in the house and rest for 10 or 20 minutes.

I monitor my BP myself and have one of those finger tip oxygen sensors. I get a complete blood workup every year from the VA and she gives me a copy of the printout so I can keep track of what's going on myself. I'm not an ex -pow or disabled so the VA won't provide my health care but they will supply my prescriptions, thus the annual checkup.

Now that we have been forced into Obamacare I no longer have a personal doctor who knows me and is familiar with my history. He was forced out of business by the new government controlled system. Now I have a doctor who only knows what she reads about me on the computer screen when I'm in her office so I find it imperative that I get those records myself and take a very active part in my healthcare. Also even though she is supposed to be my doctor I don't always get to see her when I have an appointment so the doctor I see knows even less about me and "my" doctor misses out on knowing about that visit.

I feel fine but I know at 20 years out from the bypass surgery it is likely I will need more attention in the near future and it's up to me to make sure it happens properly because my doctor doesn't live with me or have much close contact with me any more.

Hello everyone.
I am really glad for you and your condition. Let me join this discussion if I can, because my mom had her first bypass surgery almost 13 years ago. Since then she had four bypass surgery and she is not feeling that fine like you do.
She constantly has some pain under her ribs, in her chest and she is throwing up very often. Doctors told her that this condition is normally and that throwing up is caused probably by some medications that she is using.
After her first surgery, she was not in pain and she was feeling comfortable as well – she could eat, she could walk and everything was pretty much of with her. She had her first surgery in the spring and probably that was the cause of her hard breathing – the pollen and everything else.
I was wondering can you help me and tell me is this the reason? And what about her constant throwing up?

I don't know what her problem is, all I can do is relate what I've experienced. I had some problems with nausea after the operation which I finally determined was caused by the fact they reattached my xiphoid incorrectly. The surgeon said it was a hernia which was a common result after bypass surgery. Then one day I hit it on the steering wheel in my car which always hurt like hell whenever that got touched. I discovered the nausea came on exactly 4 hours after the pain. So I found an association with that. It took years for that to subside but now the nausea does not come after hitting it. I found I had to do a lot of detective work myself as the doctors were never very helpful. However nurses were very helpful when I had contact with them.

If the doctors think it's caused by the meds why aren't they changing them to solve the problem? I've had a few arguments with my doctors about meds that bothered me and I refuse to take ones that do bad things to me. I never took any pills until I had the surgery then they sent me home with a bunch of pills they wanted me to take. The pain pills were self regulating in that they had a definitive end time. The BP pills were a different story. It seems they loaded me up with BP pills just because they thought it was a good idea after the operation and I took them because I believed they were doing what was best. Then one day I ran out of one type before my refill was ready. I had been having shortness of breath when I went to bed at night and it was quite uncomfortable. The first night I didn't have those pills there was no shortness of breath. It was like being in heaven!! After a few days my pills came and the shortness of breath returned along with them. So I was certain what the cause was but my doctor was very insistent that I take them. I tried but the breathing problem was unbearable and I told him I was not taking them any more. I bought a BP tester and began taking it at home and found no ill effects of stopping those pills. Since then I have had no problem arguing with a doctor about what they think I should be taking. BP pills seem to have all sorts of unintended side effects that go along with different ones. After a few years the leg they took a vein out of to use in the bypasses began to swell up during the day but it went down over night so the doc said that was fine. Well he's not the one who has to live with that so of course it didn't bother him. They always had me on some type of supplementary BP pill to go with the main one, which he changed several times due to side effects. When the swelling became too much I tried changing that one and found one that completely eliminated the swelling. The problem is that I had to do that for myself, the doctor was never interested in assisting except that he did change my prescription after I found one that worked. Of course I couldn't go get different ones to experiment with myself. But I had the remains of several prescriptions we had tried earlier. One was the "water pill" which I stopped because I woke up in the morning with a completely dry mouth and tongue. I figured I could tolerate that if I took it in the morning so it's effects would be minimal by bedtime and during the day I would hardly notice it because I could drink water as needed. That worked like a charm but it never would have happened if I relied on the doctors to do it for me..

Hey. Yes, she is having problems with nausea but even if I am not an expert, I think that this last for a very long time. Good question - If the doctors think it's caused by the meds why aren't they changing them to solve the problem? I don’t know. I asked them the same thing and they told me that the main problem is because they did this before, they changed her medications, and now they want to see is this going to change if they continue to give her same therapy. They told us that they had patients with the same experiences and side – effects, but after a while everything was normal.
Now I am in doubt – should I wait or not?
I think that she has shortness of breath once or twice. Every day I ask her how she feels and she tells me that she is generally fine except this nauseous that she is having. She told me that she has no pressure that can make her to be scared.
We will wait for a while, and I will insist for some other medications. I hope that she is going to be fine.

I really can't tell anyone else what to do. I simply related what I did and what I had for problems.

Hello everybody,

Well, my dad has heart arrhythmia but he told me that it usually always skips one generation, so I probably won't have to deal with it, but my kid probably will.

Well, if you think you might have heart problems later on in life Brooks, I would advise that you keep your lifestyle healthy as much as you can. Eat healthy food, eat a lot of fish, fruits and vegetables, don't drink too much, don't smoke, and as they said, stress is a very big issue here, so try not to get stressed out too much. And start training, go jogging and running.

Hey guys,

My grandma died recently because of a heart attack but I don't think that she had any sort of a heart disease that could pass on to the other generations. It probably just happened because of her age, she was 87. She lived pretty long, didn't she?

My dad actually got a bit scared when she died of a heart attack all of a sudden, now he's afraid it might happen to him. He quit smoking, I've never seen anyone quit smoking that fast. He began jogging, I never saw him jogging before. He is buying fruits and stuff all of a sudden, I mean, it's good for him, I just need to get used to it.

Hi everybody,

Luckily, no one in my family has ever had problems with their hearts, but that doesn't mean that I can't have them.

My ex best friend from high school had a mother with a weak heart. The two of us were inseparable. I remember her saying that she is scared for her mum and I remember the day when she didn't come to school and I found out from our teacher that her mother has had a heart attack and died. I felt like someone squeezed my heart in that moment. 

When she finally came back to school, she told me how she is going to start living healthy because it could happen to her too, and now she is a successful athlete.