CVD And Inconvenience: A Dangerous Measurement

CVD (cardiovascular disease) is a dangerous illness. No one can deny that. However, one of the key lessons I’ve learned this year is that its (and the person with its) treatment is often determined through a lens of convenience. What I mean is not only for ourselves, if we have CVD, sometimes the symptoms are inarguably inconvenient. For instance, an asthma attack or sudden INR spike is inherently a problem… no. How you and your well-being with CVD can often be determined by the experiences of your illness by those around you.

It could be called gaslighting or some form of manipulative tactics, and maybe it is. But I don’t believe it is done with the intent to cause harm as much as preserve their own positive emotional state by lessening the reality of others who are already deemed to be a lost cause.

However, I believe that when it comes to CVD, such behavior comes with an expectation of the individual’s demise and an overexpectant focus on their end. I met some distant relatives lately, and the moment they learned about my CVD, their entire personality changed from eager joy to as if preparing for a funeral. There is an emotional weight to CVD, but too often is it the healthy who get to determine the amount of pressure it holds over the sick because, oftentimes, every problem can be connected back to CVD. Be it the sniffles, pain in the chest, or even being fatigued, even if all of them are for entirely normal reasons like allergies, lifting something heavy, or going on a run.

So, even symptoms of strength are presumed to be weaknesses.

This is why it is so often the case that since CVD has so many symptoms, it is presumed that they are all inherently connected to a CVD event. That's why even mild ones are automatically attributed to that larger illness and dismissed, in the interest of preserving the other’s emotional well-being, at the expense of the ill person’s reality.

On the other hand, this consistent overvigilance about every symptom and the long list of them being potentially dangerous/deadly leads to a state of perpetual anxiety for everyone involved, not only for those with the illness.

Sometimes, due to the emotional discomfort, it is easier for those who don’t have CVD to minimize the symptoms of those who do in order to make them look weak, crazy, or just overreacting. Since CVD is deadly, I and I’m sure others too have too often been written off as pre-dead and a lost cause to maintain the comfort of those around them.

This year, I learned a great deal regarding medical gaslighting and how it can be life-threatening, even if not maliciously intended, especially if it is done by those whom one loves or has emotional, medical, or financial power over them.

However, this is not the first time such an instance has occurred. Far from it, in fact. The difference is that I am only recently seeing the pattern for what it is. A mixture of denial and feigned ignorance to preserve the convenience of the “healthy” people around me, who, unintentionally but not blamlessly, put me in extremely dangerous medical circumstances in order to maintain their own sense of superiority while dismissing, invalidating, and infantilizing each and every sign of health until I was forced to save myself.

For example, when my pacemaker broke in 2022, I immediately felt very tired and could not figure out the reason why. When I voiced my concerns to friends and family and doctors, I was dismissed as having depression and/or burnout, but that it would get better if I worked hard enough.

Given that I just finished my first semester at my master’s program with an extremely unpleasent roomate situation, I initially believed them.

However, understandably, the breaking of the device that keeps my heart beating, in fact, did not get better. It got worse and worse and worse over a period of four months. My energy got fried, then my concentration, and then even my ability to form coherent sentences.

But everyone just acted like that was normal, and told me I wasn’t working hard enough to get better. That was until four months later, when I received a phone call from my cousin who suddenly wanted to come see me. My father called immediately afterwards and demanded that I make everything presentable, basically treating me like I was an embarrassment and that I was a walking, talking problem for the entire family.

I don’t remember much of what happened after that. But I remember coming home, and that being the only time I can clearly remember my father actually apologizing for the first time ever for not listening. If they had, then it could have been detected far sooner and would have made an extremely dangerous situation far less life-threatening if someone, anyone, had taken me seriously from the start.

However, that was a short-lived promise. The second I got back to Germany, it was like everyone forgot that I could speak.

When I returned after getting it healed, everyone was so worried about my heart health that they utterly ignored me when I walked into my new apartment and wilted. I said was a weird smell. Like rotten eggs mixed with shit and some earthy grossness I couldn’t put my finger on.

I was told by my cousins and family that I was just tired and “there is no smell.” But the smell persisted. When we left, I walked and spoke more slowly than before. When we returned to the room, I mentioned it six more times as I tried to find the source until I would not drop it, and they bit back, “Then clean it!”

So I did. I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned as best I could, but it only seemed to make the smell worse. Now, something to remember. I essentially taught myself to clean. For some reason or another, my family never taught me more than the basics, so I have taught myself and used YouTube videos and websites to learn how to clean over the years. But with one short arm and asthma, it’s difficult. But I did my damned best. So when it still didn’t get clean, I took it as a challenge, assuming I did something wrong, and tried even harder. That was until I suspected it was a plumbing problem, so I called the repair guy on multiple occasions. Nothing changed.

The landlord acted like I was a problem, so I just focused on cleaning to fix it myself. I used all kinds of cleaners to sweep, mop, dust, and deodorize everything. But it always came back by morning and drove me nuts!

The smell became embedded in my clothes, so I washed them incessantly, both in the washing machine and by hand, to try to get rid of the damn stench.

Friends began to ignore and avoid me, and even when I went to my cousin’s for Christmas for two years, I asked for advice, but they just outright denied the smell and said I just needed to clean harder. They treated my slower speech and reduced energy as if they were my moral failing. I asked for cleaning advice and about what I could be doing wrong. But one time I was comparing recipes with that cousin, and my mom, who was there on that occasion, told me to go away to set the table. I did so, and she came up to my cousin and apologized to her on my behalf as if I had made a mistake. My cousin comforted her, saying, “I know… It’s so difficult to have a daughter like her.”

They all said I wasn’t trying hard enough. I wasn’t working out. I wasn’t doing all I could. One cousin just flat-out told me that if I got a boyfriend, then I’d feel better.

Even though I was studying for a life in Germany for three years, I was about to walk into the dining room when I heard them all planning their lives around my healthy brother’s visit and continued presence in Germany, and not a single person even spoke the whole night at that dinner.

My movement and speech became slower, and I would “fade” in the middle of conversations, according to my cousin, so they were justified in talking about me behind my back and treating me like a patient and perpetual problem, not a person, no matter how I struggled even to talk sometimes.

All of it under the assumption that I was a failure because of symptoms presumed to be caused by my CVD.

But then I reread my writing from the past few months and saw how it had consistently grown stranger and less polished, even though I spent days just editing and rewriting each piece. I couldn’t understand what was going on. Yet, not even as a single person in my family who read it mentioned anything. No concern. No nothing. I even heard my aunt and mother laughing about it over the phone. It was expected that I would fail. It was hoped that I would fail.

Why help the person if they are expected to drown?

These consistent dismissals took a toll on my self-esteem and made me feel even more awful about myself. My house smelled, but I couldn’t find the cause that apparently didn’t exist, no matter what. And, apparently, according to everyone else, I deserved it because I wasn’t trying hard enough, or worse, was incapable of trying because of my health condition.

Lo and behind on December 18th, 2025, when the repairman found a huge amount of black mold in the showerhead, showerdrain, and the sink pipes of my apartment… all of which were structural problems and had nothing whatsoever to do with me. And they were there before I moved in.

I left the next day. I had a dream where my Opa told me to go to the mountains, which I thought meant go home to Colorado. But I decided to go to his hometown, Lauscha, nestled in the Thuringian Mountains.

There, I removed the clothes I washed over and over, and finally, FINALLY, could take a deep breath. The cause was finally revealed and I was free to breathe for the first time in three years… even ever.

I say this because I grew up in Colorado, which is known for being “The Mile High State.” Denver, the capital city, itself is 5,280 feet above sea level. But the state’s elevation rises much higher in the mountains, reaching up to 14,000 feet. I have had asthma my whole life and have struggled to keep up and talk for years, albeit with less obvious difficulty than my experiences in Germany. People assumed that’s “just Blair!” So, I thought it was just my illness and how life was. It was easier for everyone else, but I had to struggle.

For the first time, in the Thuringian mountain air at 2,051 feet, with cleaner air than I had ever had, I could finally breathe, speak, and think freely without being impeded by environmental factors and having it blamed on my health condition.

I developed a cough, but that was my body getting the crud out of my lungs from all those years in that apartment. I still felt better than ever.

However, upon this realization, when I asked my cousins or family members, they assumed that I was doing something wrong and just kept infantilizing me like I was just a child. A 34-year-old child with 2 bachelor’s degrees, 2 minor degrees, 7 certificates, and a master’s degree, making me one of the top 10% of scholars in Europe.

They said it was just a cold and there was no mold, then that I was obsessing, then that I was obviously wrong because I was always out of breath… but each and every single excuse they had could be and was easilly explained away by the pressece of black mold and the fact that I inhadled it for years because no one took me seriously.

My family members demand I stay in that room longer and perform tests while I sleep there so they’ll have data and may believe me. Even now, they say I’m crazy and demand I come home, even though I’m healthier and stronger than I’ve ever been.

My strength doesn’t fit their narrative.

Because the word of a sick person isn’t ever enough.

Especially if it’s inconvenient.

My point is that my family has consistently judged my situation by the scale of their convenience. It was easier for them to believe I was crazy about the smell because if I wasn’t, then they’d have to investigate, or worse, admit they were wrong and that they put me in danger. It was easier for them to dismiss my problems and consistent questions in an attempt to fix the problem as personal character flaws, low morals, low hygiene, and depression. Rather than listen to me and treat me like a person, they chose to treat me as a slowly failing project they had long since written off and were waiting to wither and fall.

They wrote me off as dead before I was dead. In my family and many others, to have a disabled “child” is a sign of a savior complex and a token of social virtue value. To have one who grows up, on the other hand, especially if they have asthma or long-term difficulties, it can be a sign of weakness for the family.

So, to maintain the family’s image, the child and their health can be sacrificed, as can be seen in my experience, for the emotional comfort of the extended family.

I am not saying it is this way in every family. But I was blind to it for far too long, and it was my heart condition and the fact that I do love my family that blinded me to this inner dynamic that almost killed me.

I only hope this story helps others.

Has anyone else fallen victim to the convenience scale?

Comment below.

P.S. Are there any aspects of CVD health or pacemakers you’d like to know more about?

Feel free to email me at:

blairmueller28@gmail.com

Tune in next Wednesday and Sunday for more!

Keep ticking, everybody!

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