Woman’s Heart Literally Breaks After Pet Dog’s Death

This week’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine features a literal ‘heartbreaking’ story about Joanie Simpson and her dog Meha. Simpson a 62-year-old retiree who previously worked in medical transcription, woke early one morning to a terrible fate.

Her back was killing her and pretty soon her chest came under great pain as well, within the next minutes she was being airlifted to a more specialized hospital in Houston, where the physicians could treat her heart attack. However, tests at Memorial Hermann hospital revealed that Simpson wasn’t suffering cardiac arrest but that she was dealing with Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, a strange condition with symptoms that mimic heart attacks. People who have this condition sometimes get it from the vulnerability they feel after a shocking emotional event such as the loss of a family member, thus the illness has become better known by its more colloquial name ‘Broken-heart syndrome.’

Simpson immediately knew the source of her pain, it was the recent death of her beloved Yorkshire Meha. “I was close to inconsolable,” said Simpson to the medical journal. “I really took it really, really hard.” The reason why her story was described in the journal was to create awareness among animal owners that the “grieving for sick or deceased pets can be as gutting as grieving for humans.” And while this is not the first case of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy happening of grieving pet owners, Simpson’s doctor, Abhishek Maiti says her story is a “very concise, elegant case” of a condition that has perplexed researchers everywhere for its quite real and sometimes fatal existence.

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Mrs. Simpson claims that at the time of her “episode,” she’d been going through family and economic problems, with her son facing back surgery and her son-in-law who had lost his job, to this added that her property sale was getting too complicated and that 9-year-old Meha was suffering from congestive heart failure, Simpson’s stress levels where going up at alarming rates. Just when things couldn’t get worse, Meha’s problems reached a boiling point and she died in a painful manner. “It was such a horrendous thing to have to witness,” said Simpson. “When you’re already kind of upset about other things, it’s like a brick on a scale. I mean, everything just weighs on you.”

Soon after that was when Mrs. Simpson suffered her heart condition, fortunately for her, the doctors were able to control it with medication and two days later Simpson was walking out the hospital’s door. Still, doctors worry that her noble persona and being the kind of person who takes “things more to heart than a lot of people,” will mean that soon her heart will break again, only that this time they hope it isn’t so literal.

Article inspired by the Independent // Woman suffers heart attack after death of beloved Yorkshire terrier