Tag Archives: Congestive Heart Failure Symptoms

Aren’t Congestive Heart Failure Symptoms Obvious?

friendly young nurse helping senior woman with medical form

A Congestive Heart Failure diagnosis is a devastating piece of news to process.

Look up information online and you aren’t likely to feel very hopeful.

The bigger issue is that congestive heart failure can go UN-diagnosed for many years, so by the time you actually hear your doctor speak those words your disease process may be very advanced and your heart may have experienced a significant amount of damage.

Do you know the symptoms of congestive heart failure?

Heart failure symptoms

  • Shortness of breath (dyspnea) when you exert yourself or when you lie down
  • Fatigue and weakness
  • Swelling (edema) in your legs, ankles and feet
  • Rapid or irregular heartbeat
  • Reduced ability to exercise
  • Persistent cough or wheezing with white or pink blood-tinged phlegm
  • Increased need to urinate at night
  • Swelling of your abdomen (ascites)
  • Sudden weight gain from fluid retention
  • Lack of appetite and nausea
  • Difficulty concentrating or decreased alertness
  • Sudden, severe shortness of breath and coughing up pink, foamy mucus
  • Elevated blood pressure
  • Profuse sweating
  • Chest pain, if your heart failure is caused by a heart attack

(Article originally published on MayoClinic.com)

You can see that most of these symptoms are typical for multiple health issues.

Can you understand how your doctor might miss the clues?

If you don’t ask to be tested, you may not even hear the term “congestive heart failure” until you are in the midst of a health crisis.

Statistics show that this condition is often mis-diagnosed or just plain undetected by doctors for years!

An excerpt from the book Bypassing Bypass

Most people first hear the terrifying term “congestive heart failure” when they are hospitalized for heart problems.

Though recently it has been noted that the death rate from heart disease and cancer in the U.S. are dropping, the number of cases of congestive heart failure has doubled during the same time that all other heart disease rates have been decreasing.

The Weakened Heart
The heart is just like other muscles. When it is weakened, it becomes enlarged, congested, flaccid, and often prolapsed (dropped from its original position in the chest). It is not unusual to require a stethoscope placement three to five inches below the normal area when listening to a weakened heart.

In addition, a weakened heart simply cannot contract forcibly enough. Imagine if you had a weakened forearm and hand. Or imagine someone cutting off the nerve impulses to your fist. Now try to squeeze a tight fist. It becomes impossible. And in the end, you can only contract your hand weakly. The same thing happens with the muscle of your heart. Only in this case, due to a weak contraction, the blood entering the heart cannot be pumped out completely.

When this occurs, congestion takes place in the body. Your body is robbed of blood, nutrition, and oxygen. You become weak, tired, exhausted, and mentally spaced out. Your heart will often try to compensate by beating faster (trying to get the blood out with faster but weaker beats). When this happens, the condition becomes complicated by the tachycardia (racing heart).

Since nutritional deficiencies causing heart problems are rarely considered in the field of medicine, you are placed on powerful drugs that attempt to keep your heart beating and try to keep the congestion from becoming overwhelming. When your heart starts to race, more drugs are used to control your heartbeat. Meanwhile, you are getting weaker and weaker as your heart starves for the correct nutrition.

(Originally posted on MNWellDir.org)

There are 4 Stages of Congestive Heart Failure.

Unfortunately, you can be all the way in the 3rd Stage of Heart Disease and still have relatively few symptoms.

On WebMD.com they describe a person in Stage 3 of Heart Failure as:

Patients with known systolic heart failure and current or prior symptoms.

Most common symptoms include:

  • Shortness of breath
  • Fatigue
  • Reduced ability to exercise

(Information originally posted on WebMD.com)

 

However, a patient in Stage 3 of Heart Failure can also show up in the emergency room having never been told that they have ANY heart issues what so ever!

You may not even notice your symptoms of heart failure!

If you do, it is very likely that you will chock them up to something else … like getting old!

 

There is an epidemic of congestive heart failure ravaging the planet.

The Life Breath Club is dedicated to helping you recognize trouble before it threatens your well being.

Your free membership helps you evaluate your health care decisions and your Masters Membership will help you make the changes you need to make to AVOID health crisis!

Do you notice signs of trouble?

 

 

 

Living With Congestive Heart Failure Symptoms; Will Easter Sunday 2011 Renew You?

Living With Congestive Heart Failure Symptoms

UPDATE March 4, 2012

Can you believe Easter is coming up again next month?

Where does the time go?

If you or your loved on are living with Heart Failure, time is more precious than ever!

Please take the following message to heart and take ACTION immediately!

You CAN heal from heart failure and absolutely any other illness you are suffering from!

Read on ….

==========================================================================================

 

Congestive heart failure symptoms cloud your perception and leave you without hope.

Easter time brings us Spring and new life.

Will Easter be a time of renewing for you?

Getting stuck in self destructive habits will tear you down.  Hurting yourself is depressing!

What will it take to cause a shift to a more nurturing space?

How can Easter Sunday 2011 begin a season of hope and renewing for you?

I have been caregiving for over 25 years.

Caregivers do what they do because of the compassion that drives them.  Nurturing others through their darkest hours takes more compassion than most people possess!

Caregivers stand in that compassionate place with such ease that they make it look effortless.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The challenge for caregivers is to prioritize self care.

Burn out will sneak up on you.  It happens gradually when you don’t notice that your grooming, social life and physical activities begin to fall away.

My burnout happened without me noticing.  I just woke up one day and found myself sick and exhausted.  I hurt from the top of my head to the tip of my toes, and I had no idea how I got there or what to do to change the situation.

The journey back to health was a process. Valuing my needs as much as those I cared for was often challenging for me.

Do you have difficulty valuing “me time”?

There are only so many hours in the day, and there is SO much that needs to be done!

My purpose drives me so much that it is easy to devalue my own needs.  The world is facing an epidemic of heart failure!

Low oxygen level is one of the most devastating congestive heart failure symptoms, an it is snuffing out life at an alarming rate!

I am passionate about teaching the world to self nurture and beat heart failure BEFORE it beats YOU!

It is so easy to find reasons that you don’t have time to slow down and rest, work usually trumps fun, and running on empty makes exercise feel like torture.

I couldn’t value “me time” until my pain level became mind numbing.

By the time I hit rock bottom, I had lost hope.

I didn’t even look for answers until I lost everything.

I couldn’t work, I couldn’t sleep, and nothing helped the pain, absolutely nothing!

That brick wall of pain turned out to be my saving grace!

The pain made me surrender. It made me be still. I had no answers.

Surrender is the first step to becoming a student. When I was ready, my teachers appeared.

I’ve got to admit that I was very skeptical of the messages I was receiving from the Universe. It was all just too simple.

My doctor was offering me narcotics to fight the pain, so the simple wisdom that kept crossing my path seemed to be insignificant.

Respiratory therapists breathe for you when you can’t breathe for yourself.

It was hard for me to accept that I was not breathing properly and that my pain level would not improve until I improved my breathing.

Un-learning what you think to be true can be impossible.

I am humbly grateful that I was able to receive that message from the wonderful teachers who saved me from myself.

I was set free from my prison of pain when I began to make significant progress with better breathing!

 

Congestive Heart Failure is a disease process that robs your hope. Continue reading Living With Congestive Heart Failure Symptoms; Will Easter Sunday 2011 Renew You?

Could Effective Snoring Solutions Stop An Epidemic of Heart Failure?

Could Effective Snoring Solutions Stop An Epidemic of Heart Failure?

When your mate wakes you with their snoring you poke them in the side to get them to roll over, so you can try to get back to sleep.  However you probably don’t give it much more attention than that.

Do you worry that snoring might be damaging your mates health?

Probably not.  But did you know that snoring is often the main cause of sleep apnea?

“Sleep apnea” means that you stop breathing while you are sleeping and it is potentially fatal.

Meaning, if you have sleep apnea, every time you sleep you risk death!

That’s a pretty big deal … wouldn’t you say?

It’s one thing to say it.  “Oh my, what a worrisome situation!”

It’s quite another thing to actually take action to do something about it.

If you get diagnosed and treated for sleep apnea, you may find that the equipment is difficult to get use to.

You can have a life threatening condition and ignore it! Continue reading Could Effective Snoring Solutions Stop An Epidemic of Heart Failure?

Can Heart Disease Lead To Heart Failure?

Can Heart Disease Lead to Heart Failure?Heart disease doesn’t get much news coverage unless someone famous dies of it.  We don’t wear pink ribbons to bring awareness to it either, but heart disease is still the number one cause of death in the world.

You can have advanced heart disease and be unaware of it.  The first sign of heart disease many times is a heart attack.

Heart Attack is a major contributor to heart failure!

It is common for women to develop heart failure within one year of having a heart attack.

Some treatments for heart disease actually contribute to heart failure!

The thousands of patients that I saw over two decades rarely made significant changes in diet and lifestyle before being prescribed drugs, and soon after started experiencing side effects from those drugs.

Many of them had surgery as well.

Much quality of life is lost when health building efforts are abandoned for harsh drugs and traumatic surgeries.

John was a patient I cared for a few years ago.

He was amazed that he had received a diagnosis of asthma.

“I thought asthma was a child-hood disease.”

Right away I noticed John’s pale color, and swollen ankles.  So I checked his oxygen level right away.

John’s oxygen saturation was 87% when he answered his front door.

He only walked 10 paces and sat in his favorite chair, but it was several minutes before his blood oxygen level returned to a safe 92%.

As soon as John caught his breath, he insisted on showing me his prized orchid collection.

He took me through a beautiful garden with shades of orchids I had never seen before!

We exited the back of the garden, where he introduced me to the most charming and charismatic flock of birds I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.

By this time I was becoming concerned about John’s labored breathing and pale color, and I had to argue with him to let me pull his oxygen machine out of its corner.

By the time I plugged it in and put him on it, John’s oxygen level was 82%.

As soon as his color returned, John removed the oxygen, and insisted on pushing it back into it’s corner, even though he was gasping by the time he made his way back to his chair.

I gave John my speech about protecting his heart muscle and his quality of life by making sure that his oxygen level was never below 92%.

My doctor said my heart is fine!” insisted John.

“I am just concerned about your oxygen level when you are caring for your garden and your birds,” I explained.

“If you use oxygen, that activity would be good for you, but without oxygen, you will stress and weaken your heart muscle.”

John smiled and patted me on the back.

“I just had an EKG and my heart is fine, please don’t worry about me.”

“Promise me that you won’t exert yourself, without oxygen?” I plead with him.

He went to patting my back again, “oh don’t you worry about me, I’ll be fine,” he said as he lead me to the door.

I couldn’t reach John for a second appointment for more than 10 months, and when I finally caught up with him he had just returned from the Mayo Clinic where he sought help for his “recurring pneumonia”.

It was at the Mayo Clinic that John received his heart failure diagnosis.

John was very angry, not at all the same person I had met 10 months earlier.

The medical people on this island are terrible!”  he almost shouted at me.  “I had to go all the way to California to find out that my heart has been damaged and it is too late to do anything about it!”

I was a little taken back, but tried to calm him down.  Though I reminded him that I had expressed concern for his heart when I had given him instructions to use oxygen during my last visit, he seemed to have no memory of that conversation.

“No one ever told me about my heart!” he seethed between clenched teeth.

So, I did my best to tell him what he COULD do to regain and protect his quality of life, but he was just too angry to listen.  John just couldn’t get past his resentment so that he could find a positive place to begin making the changes he needed to make.

John was on a slippery slope until his death.

I have always felt that his anger and resentment did him in.

John had plenty of good years left.


Heart disease CAN lead to heart failure

Heart Failure is the devastating weakening that results in your heart enlarging.

It isn’t a heart attack, but it IS end stage heart disease!

 

If you listen to the organizations chasing the almighty dollar, they will give you minimal materials and support on diet and lifestyle before they lead you down a dangerous path of drugs and surgery.

Drugs and surgery are NOT an answer to ANYTHING!

The American Heart Association released a statement in January,2008 stating that they had reached their goal of reducing the number of deaths from coronary heart disease.

They go on to say “we are pleased with the progress this new data shows, but we know we can do much more”.

They also have a report on their site boasting that drugs and surgical procedures had reduced the number of deaths from “acute heart failure”.

Nowhere on their site could I find anything about the CLIMBING death toll for Heart Failure!

They do talk about the need to reduce risk factors, and they say “we must make it a priority to institute lifestyle and behavior changes”.

Yet on their site drugs and surgery get all the attention.  Diet and lifestyle are mentioned briefly here and there without much detail, though information about drugs amounts to commercial promotion.

Did you know that The American Heart Association claims to have invested over $543 million in research, professional and public education, advocacy and community service programs to help all Americans live longer, healthier lives.

Where did this money go?

Are they supplementing food bank programs with fresh whole food?  NO.

Are they doing all they can to educate and support the average American to make diet and lifestyle changes?  NO

They are not even warning us that Heart Failure is on the rise!

They are claiming victory and watering down the message that change is necessary!  WHY?

The truth is NOT good news!

You need to hold this organization accountable or STOP giving them our money.

With $543 million dollars, Heart Failure Solutions and our ethical partners would make the effort to reduce heart disease palpable in EVERY community!

Is there similar waste going on in other organizations that you support?

Check out EVERY organization before you donate!

You can contribute to Heart Failure Solutions in the side bar to your right.  There is MUCH work to be done, this CAN’T be about profit!

This is about PEOPLE!

You can only care for others as well as you care for yourself.

Try this acronym to remind yourself of all the nurturing you need each and every day.

BLESS yourself with nurturing and you will BLESS the whole world.

Breathe

Discover how your breathing makes you sick and what you can do about it.

L  Love

Learn how to navigate life from your heart space.

Eat

Find out why not all food is medicine.

S  Sit

The BLESS action plan really begins with cultivating stillness.

However, you will find it very difficult to be Still until you heal enough to face the fire within.

Sit upright in quiet stillness and find your inner strength.

S  Speak

Sacred Breathing will give your Voice strength.

Share your story to give others hope!

 

Will Your Be the Next Blessed Life?

Become a member of the “Life Breath Club” today!

Click on the link below to learn more about member benefits.

Life Breath Club Member Benefits

This is a private membership to protect your medical privacy.

It’s FREE!

 

Many BLESSings,

Carrie Tucker, RCP

The Life Breath Coach

Heart Failure Solutions

 

PS– Remember everyday:

  • Relax and Release tension
  • Exhale Slowly
  • Be active in a way that adds Joy to your life

Plus pure water ~whole foods~sunshine~and laughter

 

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