Give Yourself a Valentine

By Farhana Khan 

February is heart month, with love spread across the community. Additionally, with Valentine’s Dayaround the corner, people are busying themselves with buying small gifts and cards, scavenging for chocolates on sale, and thinking of ways to spend special time with their loved ones. 

However, through giving love to other people and through celebrating heart month, people tend to forget about loving themselves and about protecting their own hearts.

Alcohol, a go-to for many for holiday celebrations, can damage the heart and threaten the lives of not only you, but everyone around you. By consuming excessive amounts of alcohol, an individual can damage his or her heart, weaken the heart’s ability to pump blood, and weaken the heart muscles, causing a condition known as alcoholic cardiomyopathy, which leads to heart failure. 

Too much alcohol, and you can also die from alcohol poisoning where all the major organs of the body fail.

If you’re a teen without a special Valentine this year, you might think that drinking will make it easier to approach someone of the opposite sex, go on a date or enjoy a party. But drinking alcohol can present some other significant risks. It can impair your ability to make good choices, placing you at increased risk for sexual assault. Alcohol can fuel fights, injury, dating violence and even death. So know the real risks before deciding that alcohol is the way to handle insecurities with personal relationships.

Along with alcohol, illegal drugs and substances can damage the heart as well. Taking doses of these substances, including prescribed drugs used non-medically that are not yours, can threaten the heart by increasing the risk of heart attacks and heart failure.

Most of us have read or heard about the recent heroin deaths of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman on a national level and Emylee Lonszak, a 16-year-old Fairfax County high school student. Good people dying far too young. You may not know that the heroin use by Fairfax County high schools students though low at 0.6 percent is still higher than the national norm which is 0.3 percent (see www.fairfaxcounty.gov/youthsurvey). It’s time to end these senseless deaths, so no more families or friends of victims have broken hearts on Valentine’s Day.

Instead of relying on alcohol or drugs for Valentine’s Day and other holidays, I spend time making my own food and fruit drinks with friends and family. None of us rely on alcohol and instead make an effort to spend time with one another without damaging our bodies. Specifically for Valentine’s Day, I also like to spend it with my loved ones by eating out and appreciating each other.

So tell your heart that Valentine’s Day is a holiday to celebrate love in all forms! If it’s possible for me to celebrate holidays without damaging my body, it’s possible for everyone else as well.

Farhana Khan is a senior at Westfield High School and a member of the Youth Council of the Unified Prevention Coalition of Fairfax County.  

The Unified Prevention Coalition of Fairfax County is a nonprofit organization with more than 60 community partners working together to keep youth and young adults safe and drug-free. Visitwww.unifiedpreventioncoalition.org andwww.facebook.com/unifiedpreventioncoalition. Follow the group on Twitter at www.twitter.com/keepyouthsafe.