I was watching a soap opera and the mother had a heart attack and she was like 60, and anyway she was going to go to another state to live and recouperate but then it was said she can’t do this as she’s on parole and can’t leave the state.
The doctor said “We can’t tell her, she just had a heart attack, if we tell her that she can’t go to live with her daughter the shock could kill her.”
Now could something like this really happen in real life. I could see if the woman was in the middle of having a heart attack but it was over and she was recovering in her hospital bed.
There are 6 billion people in the world. Someone, somewhere has a serious condition that could kick in and kill them based on enough stress and an increased heart rate. I have experienced panic attacks myself based on stress and they feel like what most people would imagine to be a heart attack. If you have a faulty heart already and experience a panic attack, I have no doubt that could kill someone somewhere. The physiological consequences are pronounced. Men die from shoveling light snow every year here in New England every year. There is no reason to think a racing heart from something else wouldn’t cause it under other circumstances. I have no idea what the probability is however. Balance on a teeter-totter is usually very sensitive.
Ancedotal evidence: A woman I once worked with was a 50 year old with no history of disease. She had lived her whole life with her 75 year old father. Daddy had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. He lingered for three days and died. When the doctor told the woman the news, she literally died of a heart attack from the shock.
This was in 1975. I know today she would have been revived.
A woman I used to work with had an awful time a few years back. Her father died while shoveling snow – he was in his 60’s – and her mother collapsed and died at the funeral. Stress indeed kills.
I had heard about this but did not know it was called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy , or Boken Heart Syndrome. So the answer to your question is, apparently, yes.
on a related note: do people routinely faint and fall over when hearing shocking news, like in the movies?
I just watched CastAway.( Tom Hanks as the Fedex guy whose plane crashes and he is marrooned on an isolated island, and presumed dead.) When they find him and notify his wife , she faints . There’s a similar scene in Saving Private Ryan when a mother is notified of her sons’ death at war. In the movie, the woman looks out the window and sees the priest and an army officer coming up to path to her house; she faints before they even knock on the door.
Heh. When my daughter was born and they first handed her to me, I noticed that a nurse discretely positioned herself behind me. My belief is that she was there to catch me in case I fainted.
Well, actually not. She goes outside to the porch, and when she sees the minister come out of the car, she sort of collapses to the ground, like her legs wouldn’t support her anymore. She didn’t actually faint.
There was a big house fire in my neighborhood when I was young, and my best friend’s mother was very frightened by it (it was the house immediately next door to theirs). She had a heart attack and died from it.