Bless Your Heart
What’s YOUR Story?
“Helping women everywhere, become aware.”
What’s YOUR Story?
Do you smoke?
Do you have high blood pressure?
Do you have high blood cholesterol?
What about diabetes?
Are you overweight or obese?
Do you have a sedentary lifestyle?
What would you like to do with the next 10 years of your life,
assuming you have ten years…?
On This Page
- Potential heart disease factors
- Know the warning signs
- What to do when someone succumbs to heart attack or worse
Take the test!
It’s essential that you measure your risk of heart disease and make a plan for how to prevent it in the near future. The Risk Assessment Tool available from the American Heart Association’s web site is for people 20 or older.
The tool will help you assess your risk of having a heart attack or dying from coronary heart disease in the next 10 years. It will also check to see if you may have metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that greatly increase your chances of developing cardiovascular disease including stroke and diabetes.
After you’re finished using the tool, you’ll be able to print a copy of your assessment results, risk factory summary report, metabolic syndrome assessment and action plans for those areas you need to work on in order to reduce your risk.
What are you waiting for? Get your assessment now! Get your assessment now!
The American Heart Association recommends that by age 40, everyone should know their risk score. They recommend using their assessment tool every five years or more if risk factors change.
If you have a family member who had heart disease, (mother before age 65 or father before age 55) you should know about your risk factors earlier than age twenty.
Visit the American Heart Association website to learn more about this invaluable tool they offer and what you need to successfully use it.
Chances are that either you or someone you know suffers with heart disease. Won’t you help save lives? All it takes is increased awareness. I want you to Bless Your Heart and the hearts of others by: “Helping women everywhere, become aware.”
Visit our product page to view our beautiful collection of Heart Disease awareness jewelry, PDF booklets and more. It’s absolutely something you’ll want to wear and when complimented on it, you’ll have an immediate opportunity to spread the word. You just might save a life.
What are the WARNING SIGNS?
The classic image of a person grabbing their chest, taking a deep gasp of air as they realize they are suffering a form of heart failure is rare. It also communicates a very wrong message—that a problem with your heart will be obvious. For most people it isn’t. All the more reason you should know what the warning signs and early symptoms are.
To begin with, there is a difference between a heart attack and sudden cardiac arrest. A heart attack is where the heart convulses because of a blockage. A sudden cardiac arrest is when the heart abruptly stops. A heart attack can lead to cardiac arrest or sudden cardiac arrest may be the first symptom.
Most heart attacks start slowly with mild pain or discomfort. Often people affected aren’t sure what’s happening and they wait expecting the symptoms to disappear. This is a fatal response. To survive a heart attack requires that you get help as early as possible. The American Heart Association lists the following as common symptoms for a heart attack:
- Chest discomfort. Most heart attacks involve discomfort in the center of the chest that lasts more than a few minutes, or that goes away and comes back. It can feel like an uncomfortable pressure, squeezing, fullness or pain.
- Discomfort in other areas of the upper body. Symptoms can include pain or discomfort in one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw or stomach.
- Shortness of breath with or without discomfort.
- Other signs may include breaking out in a cold sweat, nausea or light-headedness.
- A sense of mild indigestion that seems would be relieved with a good belch. Pam experienced the sense of indigestion first, followed by light- headedness, sweating, shortness of breath, nausea then vomiting. Then she felt chest discomfort and a tingling sensation in her left arm then her right. The American Heart Association indicates that chest pain is the most common, but women are somewhat more likely to experience the other symptoms particularly shortness of breath, nausea/vomiting and back or jaw pain. A person can experience any combination of symptoms.
Cardiac arrest strikes immediately and without warning.
Evidence of cardiac arrest include:
- Sudden loss of responsiveness (no response when the person is tapped on the shoulders or other means of getting their attention).
- No normal breathing (the victim does not take a normal breath when you tilt the head up and check for at least five seconds).
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO if you or someone near you suffers heart problems?
Immediately call 9-1-1 or the emergency medical services number in your area to get help. It can not be stressed too much that the earlier help arrives, the greater the chance of surviving even sudden cardiac arrest. Minutes matter.
The victim will likely not believe that a heart failure is happening and, like Pam, may even deny that calling 9-1-1 is necessary, but it is! Fast action saves lives. And in the case of a person who suffers cardiac arrest, every minute they are non-responsive is a potential for greater degrees of brain damage. Don’t delay getting help at the onset of any symptoms that SEEM to be like those listed here.
Calling 9-1-1 is the fastest way of getting help. Emergency medical professionals can provide treatment the moment they arrive and place the victim in the ambulance for the quickest way to the hospital. Understand that patients who arrive by ambulance with chest pain usually get faster service at the hospital too.
If you can’t access Emergency medical professionals, have someone drive you directly to the emergency hospital. Don’t drive yourself unless it’s your last resort. Symptoms and progression are unpredictable. If a person collapses while driving, others could be killed.