Love can break your heart

February makes me think of love, as this is supposedly the month of lovers.  Ah, love, with all its beauty and its pain!  Can there be love without pain, longing, betrayal, distrust, vulnerability, jealousy, and the myriad of emotions that can drive two lovers crazy throughout the experience?  And yet you lose yourself in the throes of its beauty, its passion, its craziness, its purity. “If I had a flower for every time I thought of you… I could walk through my garden forever,” says Alfred Tennyson.  I marvel at the purity of his thought. 

Neil Gaiman (in The Sandman, Vol 9: The Kindly Ones) says that being in love is horrible because it makes you so vulnerable — “it opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”

It seems this happens a lot of times to most people in love. A relationship is usually not equal in the sense that one partner is more dominant than the other.  The more dominant partner can rule your mind and your emotions, and drive you to the deep end. 

It is a scientific fact that one can die of a broken heart.  The fact is, a broken heart can cause mental anguish, depression, and heart disease.  There is what is called the “broken heart syndrome” which causes sudden and intense chest pain brought about by a sudden surge of stress hormones because of a hurtful experience, shock, or an emotionally stressful event.  It could be the death of a loved one, a divorce, a breakup, a physical separation, betrayal or a romantic rejection.  The sad fact is, women are more prone to this experience than men.  

The American Heart Association reports that broken heart syndrome (also known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy) may be misdiagnosed as a heart attack because the symptoms and test results are similar.  In both cases, tests show dramatic changes in rhythm and blood substances that are typical of a heart attack but differ because there’s no evidence of blocked heart arteries in broken heart syndrome.  In broken heart syndrome though, a part of your heart temporarily enlarges and does not pump well while the rest of your heart functions normally or even with more forceful contractions.  It can lead to a severe, short-term muscle failure.

Physical stress can also cause broken heart syndrome.  I just recently saw in the news a report about a bride who became unconscious in the early hours of her honeymoon night.  After they revived her in the hospital, they diagnosed her with broken heart syndrome, brought about by the physical stress of her wedding preparations.  But the bad part was she lost her memory about her wedding and reception due to the stress that she went through.  Even the video of her wedding celebration could not bring back memories of her wedding day.

More differences between a heart attack and broken heart syndrome:

• EKG (a test that records the heart’s electric activity) results don’t look the same as the EKG results of a heart attack.

• Blood tests show no signs of heart damage.

• Tests of broken heart syndrome show no signs of blockages in the coronary arteries.

• Tests show ballooning and unusual movement of the lower left heart chamber (left ventricle).

• Recovery time is quick, usually within days or weeks (compared to the recovery time of a month or more for a heart attack).

I lost a friend whose relationship was so emotionally stressful, she literally died of a broken heart.   Let us all strive to have healthy relationships and healthy hearts!