Cardiophobia is an excessive fear of heart problems, common in cardiac arrest survivors who become hypervigilant about every sensation in their chest.
After my idiopathic, out-of-hospital SCA in July 2021, I’ve often wondered what could happen now in terms of my health. At first I had a blissful ignorance about what had happened to me. This was in part due to having had a hypoxic brain injury, which caused me to have memory loss. I also felt … Read more
If you’re like me and other survivors, once you’ve returned home from hospital and life begins to settle down, you begin to think about what happened to you. For most of us, our sudden cardiac arrests came out of nowhere: uninvited and unexpected. We came perilously close to not being alive and, for me at … Read more
Surviving a sudden cardiac arrest can be terrifying. After such a traumatic experience, ongoing fears about your heart health are entirely understandable. This excessive, persistent worry has a name – cardiophobia. In the dimly lit confines of his apartment, Mark sat hunched over his laptop, his fingers hovering over the keyboard with trepidation. The screen … Read more