Atrial Fibrillation

Cardiology is so interesting. Consider Broken Heart
Syndrome. Or as the Japanese say 'takotsubo syndrome.' The emotional
Impact of the death of a loved one is so powerful the woman's heart takes on the shape
of an octopus (tako) trap (tsubo). True story.

Well, that may have been the incident that led to the discovery of the syndrome, but my good wife experienced Takotsubo Syndrome at Kelowna General Hospital 18 or 20 years ago, and it wasn't brought on due to the loss of a loved one. She was having a full pre-surgery check-up prior to scheduled femoral bypass surgery, when one of the various doctors said he feared she was actually having a heart attack: her pulse rate was alarmingly high, she was perspiring, shortness of breath. He immediately gave her nitroglycerin and had her "admitted" to emergency. Turns out that one of the heart ventricles swells up, temporarily, to almost twice normal size. The diagnosis was Takotsubo Syndrome. Current thinking is that stress can bring it on, (loss of a loved one would obviously qualify.) In my wife's case, she found all hospital visits very stressful. Treatment was simply three months of "rest" and she was prescribed some heart medication that, I think, she continues to take to this day, although the cardiologist said, at the time, that he didn't really know if it would help or not. Her scheduled surgery (which was to 'clean out' an earlier aorto-bifemoral bypass) had to be cancelled, which, in the end, was the most unfortunate result of the Takotsubo Syndrome: during the three months of "rest", the original bypass became occluded, necessitating a subsequent femoro/femoral bypass.