A Patient’s Guide to Living Confidently With Chronic Heart Failure

Chronic heart failure (CHF) refers to the ongoing condition of your heart’s inability to pump sufficient blood to meet your body’s demands. The name of any medical condition that includes the word failure can be intimidating, particularly when it concerns your heart. After all, failure implies there is no hope, right? Wrong! The medical term “failure” can be demoralizing, but patients can identify ways to increase the chances of living longer and living well with CHF. To live successfully with CHF, it is important to develop confidence. For heart patients, confidence can refer to self-assurance, positive and healthy actions, and expectations that desirable health outcomes can be achieved. CHF is challenging because it requires patients and families to understand and monitor CHF symptoms, manage distress, accept the value of the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD), and pursue quality of life (QoL). For CHF patients, these ambitious goals involve developing confidence in each aspect of the treatment plan, spanning disease confidence, device confidence, and QoL confidence. Disease confidence is a way of thinking and feeling about your disease that results in a greater sense of personal security and empowerment. Disease confidence can be developed by taking appropriate self-care in managing your CHF. Self-care involves a level of understanding about your medical condition, as well as making informed decisions about your care to minimize symptoms and/or to respond effectively to symptoms that may occur.1 ### Understanding CHF CHF is a complicated disease state that is unique for each individual. For example, some patients will experience frequent bouts of excessive fluid retention, whereas others will note mild shortness of breath with exertion. The first and most important step in becoming disease confident is being knowledgeable about CHF and how it affects you. Similar to mastering subjects in school, a patient with heart failure can and should learn …