Sandeep Jahar

A patient of mine was admitted to the hospital, and weeks prior, her husband had died, and

And a couple of weeks after the funeral, she took a look at his picture and all these emotions came back, flooded back.

Sadness, the grief over their life together.

She developed chest pain.

And she got short of breath.

And by the time she was in the hospital, she had distended neck veins, water in her lungs.

She was visibly panting.

all signs of congestive heart failure.

So we suspected that she had actually had a heart attack, that she had blockages in the arteries that feed her heart.

But when we checked with a angiogram, her coronary arteries were pristine.

It wasn't a hint of blockage anywhere.

But her heart had weakened to less than half its normal function.

And it had a very unusual shape.

And what we found was that it was the syndrome Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or the broken heart syndrome.

Takotsubo is a special pot that's used in Japan to trap octopuses.

And it has a sort of wide base and a very narrow neck.

And that's exactly the way her heart looked on the ultrasound that we did.

The base was constricted.

The apex of the heart had ballooned out.

into this distinctive shape.