Joanie Simpson woke early one morning with a terrible backache. Her chest started hurting when she turned over. Within 20 minutes, she was at a local emergency room. Soon she was being airlifted to a hospital in Houston, where physicians were preparing to receive a patient exhibiting the classic signs of a heart attack. But tests at Memorial Hermann Heart & Vascular Institute - Texas Medical Center revealed something very different. Doctors instead diagnosed Simpson with Takotsubo cardiomyopathy , a condition with symptoms that mimic heart attacks. It usually occurs following an emotional event such as the loss of a spouse or child. That link has given the illness its more colloquial name: broken-heart syndrome. In Simpson's case, the event that she says tipped her over the edge was the recent death of her beloved Yorkshire terrier, Meha. "I was close to inconsolable," she said. "I really took it really, really hard." Simpson's 2016 ex
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