A serious medical warning

Was my most influential teacher.

I used to be very impatient and not very in tune with my health. I only saw a doctor when I needed to have some medication, like antibiotics, or have a breast cyst drained. I thought I was healthy overall. What I didn’t know was that I had something growing in my heart from around the age of 30. There was no way to know it ,partially because I was living in the United States, and I avoided the doctor because it was so expensive even for a check-up,and besides, I was young and, I thought, healthy. Also, a machine called the echocardiogram that allows doctors to see inside your heart had not been invented.

So, 5 weeks after my 50th birthday, I was very surprised when I had a massive stroke that I barely lived through .I then learned that the stroke itself was a side effect of a much more serious problem, a large benign tumor in the right atria of my heart. I was lucky to have the stroke because it alerted doctors to the tumor. Most people with this type of tumor don’t get a warning. they will literally just drop dead.

The tumor is called an atrial myxoma, and it’s proof that something doesn’t have to be cancerous to kill you. If a piece of it hadn’t broken off and traveled to my brain, I wouldn’t be alive today to write about it.

I highly recommend that everyone should get an echocardiogram scan because it’s the only way to know if you have a heart tumor. Don’t think that just because you’re younger that you’re perfectly healthy. Get the scan. I didn’t realize that the fact that I was short of breath was a symptom of anything other than the fact that I was getting older, and that is literally the only symptom I had .

If you’re reading this, call your doctor tomorrow and request an echocardiogram. It could very well save your life.