Abstract

Coronary heart disease remains the leading cause of death and disability in the United States. Approximately 15 million people in the United States will have an acute myocardial infarction each year, and two-thirds of these people will survive the event and undergo rehabilitation. ;The purpose of this study was to describe the essence of human sexuality as perceived and experienced by older women post-AMI. The fact is that older women suffer an equal number of AMIs as men, and this study should help to increase the knowledge that will enable nurses to deliver more holistic nursing care to this large and growing percentage of the population of the United States. ;A hermeneutical method, based on the philosophical perspective of Martin Heidegger, was used to provide an increased understanding of the meaning of sexuality post-AMI from the perspective of six older women who had experienced an AMI. An interpretation of the meaning of sexuality for these selected AMI clients was derived from an analysis of transcribed texts of unstructured, in-depth interviews with these clients. The interpretation revealed shared practices and common meanings among these older women who had AMIs. ;The narratives revealed that the six women in the study did not identify their AMIs as the life-altering events that conventional wisdom portrays them to be. Instead, these women viewed their AMI as just another disease like the diseases they and others had suffered and survived in the past. Nor were their AMIs purely the physical events that the medical community's treatment was designed to address. Each of these women saw the medical community's total emphasis on physical rehabilitation as incomplete. In the absence of information from the medical community about the affective domain of their lives, including sexuality, these women looked to their pasts and personal support systems. These women also took the initiative to ask their nurses questions about their lives following their AMIs. These questions inspired their cardiac rehabilitation nurses to add the caring component to their professional competence and technical expertise. This new, caring environment of the cardiac rehabilitation center transformed the rehabilitation program into a rehabilitation process and enabled these women clients not only to survive their AMIs but to thrive from the experience