Health bloggers you'll love

Blogger Carolyn Thomas |60| Victoria

Blog Heart Sisters myheartsisters.org

Carolyn Thomas wasn’t interested in blogging. Then, at 58, she had a heart attack while taking an early morning walk. Overwhelmed by nausea and a crushing pain in her chest that extended down her left arm, Thomas leaned against a tree and thought, This had better not be a heart attack because I do not have time for this. She went to the hospital and was both relieved and mortified to receive a diagnosis of acid reflux. “I was so embarrassed to have wasted their time,” she says.

But the symptoms persisted. On a family visit to Ottawa, she had two attacks in the airport, followed by two on the plane. “I white knuckled it and thought, If I can just make it home, I’ll be okay.” Two weeks after her acid reflux diagnosis, Thomas had an emergency angioplasty. While recovering, she combed the Internet for information on women and heart disease. “I was so curious about what the heck had just happened to me,” she says. Thomas discovered a leadership symposium on women and heart disease at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota; she applied and says she became the first Canadian ever invited to attend.

Thomas decided to share what she’d learned by holding a Pinot and Prevention party and was shocked when 25 women showed up to a friend’s living room to hear her talk about heart disease. Before long, she was booking parties three months in advance and was sought out to speak in hospitals, at women’s community organization meetings and even at Heart and Stroke Foundation events as a patient advocate. To let people know about her upcoming heart health-related events, she launched a “tiny, bloggy thing” on April 5, 2009, which evolved from three static pages into a full-fledged blog with close to 90,000 visitors — and counting. “If you had told me this would happen when I started, I’d have thought it impossible,” she says. “I look at my blog as cardiac rehab for my brain. The gravy is when people respond — when you get a great response, it motivates you to do more.”

It’s not an “I woke up this morning and had coffee” blog, claims Thomas. While her posts are personal, they usually feature news on emerging cardiac research and general information about women and heart disease. “I didn’t want people going about their lives with serious symptoms and dismissing them the way I did,” she explains.

Some of her most loyal visitors are fellow heart attack survivors. “For women with heart disease, it’s common to feel alone.” They feel a kinship to Thomas because “I’ve walked in their shoes.”