To provide a website to support people living with cardiomyopathy and to inform people about the impact that Cardiomyopathy has on health, lifestyle and longevity.<\/p>\n
I was diagnosed with Dilated Cardiomyopathy on January 7, 2000- one week after my 18th birthday. I was working as a bus boy at a restaurant and started feeling very dizzy, the next week I saw my doctor who took an EKG and read an abnormality in my heart rhythm. I was recommended to go to a cardiologist who took tests and found the Cardiomyopathy. When I found out that I had this disease I didn’t know what to expect, because I did not know anything about it. Once my family and I became educated about the disease they were very upset and thought that I would need a heart transplant. I found myself more angry than upset and also in a deep state of denial. When your that young you feel invincible, especially being in high school you would think that the likelihood of being diagnosed with a heart condition is very slim. I started taking medication right away and tried to maintain my normal lifestyle. I lived like a normal kid my age would, I partied, went to school, and went to work. The truth was that I could not continue down that path, I was partying way too much, getting carried away with drinking, not eating right and had put on some extra weight-I did not have a healthy lifestyle.<\/p>\n
This past year I realized how important it was too improve my condition-my ejection fraction-the measure of the pumping function of the heart had dropped dramatically which had put me in the range for receiving a defibrillator. I realized that I need to be proactive if I want to avoid the possibility of ever needing a heart transplant.<\/p>\n
I am a very optimistic person, I feel very fortunate and lucky to have found this disease before something bad occurred. Cardiomyopathy is a very hard disease to diagnose, so a lot of people that have the disease may not even know they have it.<\/p>\n
Most people I talked to were and still are uneducated about Cardiomyopathy like I was when I was diagnosed. I believe that people need to get educated about Cardiomyopathy and if you have some of the symptoms listed on this site-go see your doctor and get a recommendation to see a cardiologist. If you do have the disease it is much better to get it diagnosed sooner than later.<\/p>\n
Feel free to email me at jon.kirk@hugeheart.org anytime if you have any questions or if there is ever anything I can do to help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our Mission To provide a website to support people living with cardiomyopathy and to inform people about the impact that Cardiomyopathy has on health, lifestyle and longevity. About Jonathan Kirk I was diagnosed with Dilated Cardiomyopathy on January 7, 2000- one week after my 18th birthday. I was working as a bus boy at a restaurant and started feeling very dizzy, the next week I saw my doctor who took an EKG and.. Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31,"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28\/revisions\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hugeheart.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}