New Heartbeats Executive Committee Members
Long-standing members Marydeane Paranihi-Morris and Neil Anderson accepted positions on…
We can help through shared information, personal experience and management of your heart condition
if you’ve just had a life-threatening heart attack, have been told by your doctor that your largest heart artery is 99% blocked and it’s called ‘the widow-maker’, then left by your doctor without any further information, wondering if you are going to die…
if you have been told that you need open heart surgery, and replacement of your aortic valve with a mechanical one, and are terrified with the thought of having someone putting their hands INSIDE your chest…
if you wake up some nights with your heart fluttering like a caged bird or pounding so hard and fast that it feels like it is breaking out of your chest…
if you have survived a cardiac arrest, where your heart has stopped, and you are scared out of your mind about when it is going to happen again, or whether you are going to live another week, month or year…
“It’s a strange, scary experience when you are breathing but your lungs don’t seem to be working, and it feels like your chest has a tight metal band around it, stopping it moving up and down. I felt like a truck had hit me, leaving me alive and conscious, but beaten up, and exhausted. I was fit, but had to sit down on the low, stone wall along my driveway.”
That was my first heart attack. I had a second one in hospital before getting my stent.
Coming out of hospital ten days later, I could find no-one who could answer all my questions, even after reaching out to Heart Foundation, looking for people who understood what I had gone through. There was no support for heart patients and heart event survivors, anywhere.
That was the moment when Heartbeats was born . . . as a real, heart patient-to-heart patient support group, to talk about your experience, take your hand, and share the journey of mutual recovery, together.
Heartbeats is a peer-peer community of heart event survivors with shared life experience of heart attack, cardiac arrest, open-heart heart surgery, atrial fibrillation & ablation, and every type of heart condition.
We offer personal, individual support at our physical group meetings and online, as well as rehabilitation, dietary and counselling services.
If you’re a heart event survivor, you’re ONE OF US. Heartbeats is a grassroots non-profit organization, for heart people, by heart people. We offer the kind of real support for heart people, not currently available and never before seen in New Zealand.
Membership is FREE and the only requirement is that you are a heart patient, or a heart event survivor.
Heartbeats has had over 350 members across Aoteaoroa New Zealand, whom we have personally helped and this is growing at about 50 per year!
