Dear Sara,
My sister recently had a heart attack, in August of 2004. She had to take a year off of work and was paid a disability salary.
At first she did not experience any symptoms of depression. She did have pain around the area where they did a bypass (triple), When she was first released from the hospital she was quite fearful, almost terrified, of going out in the car. Her doctors had told her that if the air bag was activated for some reason that her heart would not be able to take the stress of that sudden, heavy pressure on her incision site. She experienced swelling, in the shape of a banana at the incision site.
So her initial response to the heart attack was fear of all the possible things that could go wrong after the surgery.
Prior to her heart attack she led a very full life as a professional with an active social life, a happy marriage, and was in excellent physical health and worked out regularly. It was a rare day when she would even need to take a Tylenol.
Then she started thinking about
how close she could have come to death, and started trying to change her lifestyle and how she managed everyday stress and the stress of her job. Suddenly she became overcome with depression. The more depressed she got the more she experienced confusion, mood swings and short term memory problems. Apparently some of this was also related to her body adjusting to all the meds she now had to take. Now she seems to have the depression under control and her memory has improved and so has her mood.
Having an unpredicted fright to your health, along with the major changes that you have to make in your life are surely stressful.
I do not think it work hurt to have a check up with a neurologist to ease your mind and reduce your stress.
I recently had two different MRI’s which showed some changes in my brain, I do not understand these results yet. The first radiologist said it was possible that I had MS. After spending a few minutes with the neurologist he requested that I have a second MRI so we could compare the two sets of results. He told me he was much more concerned about
what appeared to him to be a reactive depression, rather than MS.
The neurologist strongly felt that I required therapy to deal with the fact that I had suddenly been hit with a chronic illness which is life altering. I now have so many limitations as to what I can do, and on top of that the pain is often excruciating.
Bottom line is it would never hurt to get things checked out that you are worried about
, but let's pray that it is just a temporary thing that will go away with time and as you make all the adjustments that you are dealing with. Keep us posted.
God Bless,
Judy/Effie
