Your Heart Was Broken
You know that feeling when, out of the blue, your loved one says it’s not working and it’d be better to move on as just friends? Oh, and by the way, there’s someone else. Turns out that awful hollow feeling, that twisting painful stew of shock, loss and betrayal that permeates every cell, has a medical name now: stress cardiomyopathy.
It seems, according to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine, that we were right all along to call it a broken heart. It’s a kind of passing heart attack.
It’s confirmed also that people can die from broken hearts, though other factors contribute. Most victims recover, however, without permanent damage, just a little wiser. There’s actually a whole biochemical process to breaking a heart. It involves pain, shortness of breath and extremely high levels of stress hormones, including adrenaline, in doses up to 34 times normal. These unguided hormones rage through the body, creating fear and chaos to gang up and stun the heart temporarily.
All of the study’s subject patients had experienced serious emotional jolts, ranging from a surprise party up through seeing a loved one die. Most cases involved women, some even requiring temporary life support.
Doctors, who apparently don’t read Harlequin novels, grew suspicious when they encountered several women with all the symptoms of heart attack but no lasting heart damage. Earlier, puzzled pathologists had reported assault victims dying of heart attacks, not their wounds, suggesting another kind of trauma at work.
This reaffirming news -- methodical science confirms what uneducated intuition told us we already knew -- arrives just in time for Valentine’s Day, that organized midwinter orgy of commercialized romance pitching both woo and products. Little of this heartwarming calendar break, so full of pink and roses, suggests the now too-apparent physical dangers of humans getting involved and uninvolved with romance.
Perhaps by next Feb. 14, the nation’s quivering romance industry will offer a new candy medicine, a heart-shaped red pill available only by prescription from best friends that will mend the broken heart and even coax the love-addled mind back to an unromantic reality.
Right now, what this country really needs is a whole new rack of cardiac-friendly greeting cards for stricken former lovers: “Roses are red, Violets are blue, My EKG says, I’m not over you.”
