What is a SCAD?

I decided to do this blog in attempt to reach out and hopefully connect with those who have been diagnosed with this rare form of heart disease. 

What I had was called a Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection, also known as a SCAD. What it's left me with is permanent Coronary Artery Disease. 

So what is a SCAD? A SCAD happens when the inner walls of one of the major arteries of the heart dissect without warning. Meaning they fall apart. There are three walls in your arteries, and when they dissect, the blood forms a small clot blocking the flow of oxygen to the rest of the heart muscle. This gives various symptoms (palpitations, shortness of breath, chest pain), often mimicking a heart attack. And then it actually turns into a heart attack. 

SCADs account for less than 1% of all Coronary Artery Disease related heart attacks. They typically happen without any pre-existing health conditions or presence of heart disease. The majority of patients who have suffered a SCAD are women who could have any of the following: recently post-partum, cocaine use, extreme physical exercise, connective tissue disorders (Ehler's Danlos Vascular Type or Fibromuscular Dysplasia), high blood pressure, extreme emotional distress or oral birth control. Then there's the random few of us who don't fit into any of those categories. There is some suggestion that we may have been born predisposed to this happening, but there is little research to back that claim up.

What I've learned so far in having something most people have never heard of is that it's incredibly isolating. Not that people don't help or try to understand, because the support I've had has been incredible. But it's so unheard of that finding someone who knows what this is like first hand has been thus far impossible. So hopefully this can help someone or at the very least, be a therapeutic outlet