healing a broken heart

the comfort cub idea came to me after i lostmy son. my little boy george died the day he was born. and along with the obvious emotional painyou have of losing a child, i got some surprising physical symptoms. my heart literally ached and my arms ached. and i had no idea why that was happening. so when you get a weighted object in yourarms it actually does something chemically in your brain that causes your neurotransmittersto fire in your brain and it sends out dopamine and saturnine.

which are the happy hormones and that helpsyou to feel much more calm. it allows your breathing to slow down, itallows your heart rate to slow down and you get an overwhelming feeling of wellness andcalm. in the last six years that have just givenit a clinic diagnosis and it's called takotsubo syndrome. broken heart syndrome or takotsubo syndrome,it has a lot of different names. one of the medial terms is stress-inducedcardiomyopathy. and what happens in this syndrome, is thepatients heart, the tip of it, or the apex as we call it, balloons out.

where as the base or the bottom part is beatingnormally. the studies vary on what's the most commontrigger, but certainly i think the, in my experience, the most common trigger is a "brokenheart." a sudden loss of a loved one. far and away, in the cases i've seen that'sthe most common trigger. and they experience symptoms and signs, thatfor all intensive purposes mimic a real heart attack. including the electric cardiogram and includingthe blood test we use that we use to diagnose a heart attack.

someone who's experiencing takotsubo syndromeis probably having a surge of adrenaline in their body. we believe that's what causes this. so anything that can help lessen that adrenalineand cause the release of counter hormones like dopamine and good things could potentiallybe therapeutic, and i can see how having a weighted object to lift and hold close, especiallyas a mom, might be able to elicit an emotional response that could have real therapeuticvalue.