Welcome to Dr. Warrick's podcast channel. Warrick is a practicing cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education. Warrick believes educated patients get the best health care. Discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love. Hi, my name is Dr. Warrick Bishop and I'd like to welcome you to my podcast and videocastation today. I have the privilege of an interview with Lisa Ryan, who's a life coach helping people through her own experiences. She runs a website and a Facebook group called Keep Looking Upwards. Lisa is based in Brisbane, but thank you for joining me today. Hi, Lisa. Hi, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Look, I'm going to let you do most of the story, but from what we've spoken about already, I understand really you had a pivotal point in your life which allowed you to make some choices and take some ownership. I don't really want to start with that, but what I'd like to do is start with where things began for you and really work towards your early 40s when I know you ran into some major issues with health. Yeah, it is a long story, so I'm happy to keep it brief. But it is about that alcohol is, for me, became an addictive substance and I became very dependent on it and I thought I was using it. for my anxiety. I had a lot of, I enjoyed having stressful jobs, if that sounds really strange, because I came from a people-pleasing sort of mindset. And so to help with my anxiety, which I thought I was doing, I depended on alcohol. And that, as the jobs increasingly got more stressful, I ended up increasing my alcohol usage. And I think what I really want to share today is that you don't really understand what alcohol does to your heart and to your blood sugar levels so that you end up with diabetes like I did in my early 50s by the time I got to that point. And I had all those heart issues. So I think it was such a progressive. It didn't all just happen in one month or one year. It was the fact that if I could go back to a certain point in my 40s where I could say, oh, you know, this is what you're starting to do to your body, this long-term progressive abuse that you're doing. And there's more and more studies these days that will tell you that there is no safe level of alcohol because of the nature of it. becoming a progressive dependency. So for me, I sort of got to that point where I did get to 50s, in my early 50s, where I was in hospital for two weeks, had an enlarged heart, and that's when I got diagnosed with diabetes and lots of gut issues. So we might come back to that time when really... the alcohol consumption caught up with you but can we step back just a little and a couple of questions is there are there issues of alcohol within the family and how old were you and why did you reach out to alcohol at the time that you did there is I have one relative that um People used to talk about my uncle, about his alcohol usage. But by the same token, those people who talked about him actually, when I look back, had issues of their own. And so I guess my parents went from being teetotalers to a certain level of abuse and dependency, and then they'd be teetotalers again. So it was a very strange environment, a very unstable environment. I think that's where I got my need for control because as a child, I didn't have a lot of control and I had a very unstable environment. So all of those things led to me being the people pleaser and the need. And I think that's why I liked, I have come from an admin background, so I think that's why I liked it. I liked that attention to detail was also about control. But funnily enough, when you reach for alcohol, because I think it's socially acceptable to do so. It's the one drug, though, that people question you trying to give up. No one questions you giving up smoking or becoming a vegan. But if you decide that something that you're doing isn't working for you, that's the one thing that you'll get questioned on. But I didn't know any of that because all the advertising tells you that it's cool, it's what will make you fit in, which is coming from the people-pleasing thing that was my story as well. So I did it to be accepted and then I got depression and anxiety issues come into it when I thought that was also helping, that it would calm my nerves. And in actual fact, it actually fuels your anxiety. So it actually makes it worse. So then like doctors would tell me, if I use this tool, like an exercise that would help my anxiety, I'd say, well, it doesn't work. But lo and behold, when I finally gave away the alcohol, I've come off all my depression and anxiety medications because they are the tools that I didn't have at the time. And people didn't really discuss a lot of these things about mindset and just changing the way you think about things and changing your habits. It wasn't really talked a lot about, say, 10 years ago, 11 years ago. We'll come back to the mindset and habits because I'd like to keep that for the sharing about how you moved through your own experience and took ownership. Just in terms of consumption of alcohol, how much were you drinking and where were you fitting it into your day? Were you alcoholic? Were you able to function at work? Were people aware that you were suffering a problem? And then we'll talk a little bit about what happened with your heart because I think that's really important. I don't know if it wasn't really, there was one job that it was brought up. But they were very sympathetic because I was part of a really good team and I think that they were just wanting me to be well. So I started off, I've always had jobs where I was dependent on a lot and relied upon. So it really upset me that I did get into a pattern of behaviour where I just was sick all the time from gut issues caused by the alcohol. headaches and constant headaches and migraines and i did become i wasn't at work as a lot and i was letting people down and so that only made me more depressed and unhappy and i part of my daily life i was a very by the time i finished i had i was a very heavy daily drinker so um yeah i mean it was not good at all It's also important for people who are listening to be aware that just from the way we're made up, our physiology, women are more susceptible to damage from alcohol at the same level as a male of the same size. So because of fat distribution and hormonal distribution, there is an importance for women to be aware that they really shouldn't be keeping up with their partner. let alone if they're drinking in excess, they're really vulnerable to some of the negative side effects of alcohol. So when you got sick, Lisa, what were the first things you noticed about your heart playing up? And for those listening, alcohol toxicity can lead to cardiac failure of its own. And obviously that's what your story was. What did you notice, Lisa? And we'll get to how you presented. And that moment, and then we might wrap it up and look to what pivoted in our opportunity to speak for a second podcast. I think I didn't realise that this constant waking up at three o'clock in the morning with my heart pounding was actually making the heart work harder than it needed to, that it wasn't good for it. I didn't really understand that doing that on a constant basis was really bad for the heart. So by the time I got to hospital, I had diagnosed with an enlarged heart and they told me that I had the potassium levels of a dead person. And I didn't understand that the heart needed potassium to actually function. So it didn't mean anything to me. I also didn't understand that alcohol. strips your body of any kind of nutrients and that and it also messes with your blood sugars and that led to me being diagnosed with diabetes as well so while I was in hospital so I and I became overweight because I was also abusing food by eating too much as well so I was obese and so my poor heart just really didn't stand a chance I don't think it was you know, really working hard to keep me going. And did you have to go into hospital as an emergency when you first went in? Yeah, I went into the... I did, sorry. I went into... I'd been home for about a week just constantly vomiting and I couldn't get in to see my GP and in the end I just said to my husband, I think... I think I probably should go to hospital. Or he said it. I'm not really sure. I can't remember. One of us decided that I'd go. And so, yeah, he took me into one of the local emergency departments. And initially it was just to, I was so weak, I'd actually lost a lot of weight because I couldn't keep anything down. That's how I ended up in the emergency department. And then while I was there, they diagnosed me with pneumonia as well. And so I had, and then over those course of the next day or so, then every, to me, it seemed like just about every specialist was coming at me, you know, with a different diagnosis. So we might pause there in the interest of time. In summary, it sounds like your journey started with anxiety and a use of alcohol that really didn't serve the purpose that you were reaching out. You ended up using more alcohol than you should have. Correct. It impacted your life on a daily basis and really the cumulative effect of it led to damage to your heart, a situation where you were run down, had pneumonia, but also had issues with weight and importantly, even diabetes. So an absolute conundrum at 50 odd years of age. So I know that you've turned things around and I look forward to us sharing another podcast to talk about how you made those changes. For those listening, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you found this an interesting start as it will end up being an inspirational finish. Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Warrick. And for those listening, we'll be back for part two. Thank you. You have been listening to another podcast from Dr. Warrick. Visit his website at drWarrickbishop.com for the latest news on heart disease. If you love this podcast, feel free to leave us a review.
