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Broken Heart Syndrome (takotsubo cardiomyopathy)
A sudden weakness in the heart muscle.
Symptoms often mimic a heart attack.
This happens right after a physically or emotionally stressful event.
The condition can last a few days or weeks.
With medicine, most people recover completely.
***
Monica’s beeper goes off.
It's a page to the ER for Altman.
Swallowing the bile collecting in her throat and the pain in her chest she forces herself to move away from the door of the on-call room.
She should take the elevator down. Even with her crutches, she could barely walk. Tears were falling down her face uncontrollably. Her arms were numbing. The stairs. She's taking the stairs. The last thing she needs right now on her first day back was judgment and pity from her colleagues pressurized in a moving metal box.
Struggling on the way down the stairs with her crutches, Monica keeps replaying their two bodies intertwined again and again. So intimate, so devoted…
Then her mind flashes back to Amelia’s steady hand holding hers tightly before going under anesthesia. Her eyes red rimmed with concern, piercing blue staring into her soul. Her thumb softly rubbing her temple, comforting her as she was bleeding out, breathing unsteadily, drugs being pumped into her veins through her wrist IVs.
Her mind flickers back to Toni caressing Amelia’s head in her arms, running her hands through her hair. Her hair. The same hair she gently played with as Amelia stirred in her sleep peacefully, her head resting on her chest when she woke up from the OR hazy... head heavy... drifting in and out.
Her mind glitches back to their lips dancing over each other with passion and desperation. Her lips.
Monica’s mind flashed back to the feeling of Amelia’s lips resting on her head. Nestled in the nook of her neck, both laying side by side, sharing Monica’s bed, cozy under the covers. Amelia’s warmth radiating into Monica’s ice cold bones. Monica’s eyes squeezed in excruciating pain as her painkillers were wearing off. Her touch distracting her from the agony, Amelia trying to take away her pain, then the feeling of her chin resting on her scalp, her fingers stroking circles across her back, a constant source of comfort as she fell back asleep. When she woke up... Amelia was gone. And now... she had lost her again.
Reaching the first floor, breaking through the doors, the sounds of the bustling ER add to the ringing in her ears. The pain was too much. Her crutches clatter on the ground. She falls against the nearest wall in tears, sliding down until she is sitting on the ground trying to slow her shortness of breath, holding her chest.
“Monica! What’s going on? What’s wrong?” Altman rushes over.
“I-I think I’m having a–”
She takes a wheezing breath in, “a panic attack,”
“No, it's definitely not a panic attack.” Altman’s stethoscope is on her chest.
“You’re having a heart attack.”
To be continued?