My Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy: Broken Heart Syndrome
A temporary condition that is often brought on by stressful situations and extreme emotions.
Well, we knew it was going to be difficult.
Those words live in my mind. If I think too much about them, I start to feel pain around my heart, and I cry: Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy or Broken Heart Syndrome.
How did this even happen?
It seemed like any other day at work. First up was a Zoom meeting with my manager, but as soon as the manager came on camera, I had an immediate reaction. A stab in the heart. My breaths became shorter, and the ache around my heart became so intense all I could say was
I need to leave. I feel really unwell.
A little later, the third person at the meeting contacted me to ask if I was OK. I tried to describe what I had felt so she could understand my leaving. I felt terrible to have left the meeting the way I did. We had all been working on trying to regain trust between my manager and me so that we could get back to a better working relationship. This broken heart pain was something I needed to figure out. I had had a similar experience when my mother died but never at work or about work. I was lucky to find an article on Medium, which led me to do more reading.
A study by Maria Casagrande in the Journal of Clinical Medicine (2021) demonstrated that the perception of life experiences is different for patients who have had a Takotsubo syndrome event when compared to acute myocardial infarction patients and healthy individuals. I hope understanding how my life events and perception of those events may contribute to the manifestation of the broken heart symptoms will help better manage the response.
I could at least understand the relationship between my manager and me still had problems, and it took me about two weeks before I could commit to another meeting. The first thing in the meeting was to discuss what had happened, what I had felt, and why I took flight. I described my chest pain and how I had cried every night the following days. My managers' response to what could have been a fatal situation was
Well, we knew it was going to be difficult.
After that, I didn't have much to say. I cried a lot that night from the realization that my manager didn't care for me as a human being. I am just disposable, like a tissue from a box, a 'difficult' tissue. But I have a starting point for my future; I can learn to value myself and not let others bring me down.
Reference: The Broken Heart: The Role of Life Events in Takotsubo Syndrome. Maria Casagrande, Giuseppe Forte, Francesca Favieri, Francesca Agostini, Jasmine Giovannoli, Luca Arcari, Ilaria Passaseo, Raffaella Semeraro, Giovanni Camastra 4, Viviana Langher, Mariella Pazzaglia, Luca Cacciotti. J. Clin. Med. 2021, 10(21), 4940.
