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Last night, as I was eating dinner and watching The Last Starfighter on Blu-Ray, I got a phone call from a hospital emergency room. My mother had been feeling chest pains for the past week, and finally they got so bad that she called 911.

I spoke with her, then with her doctor. She'd had an EKG and an echo-cardiogram, and he was about to do an angiogram. It was possible that she had had a heart attack, but based on what he saw he strongly suspected that her condition was apical ballooning. About a half-hour later he called back, and said the angiogram had confirmed his diagnosis.

Apical ballooning is an enlargement of the lower part of the heart. It's associated with the people who are under a great deal of stress or anxiety for long periods of time. Hence it's acquired the nickname "broken heart syndrome." It can be result of the death of a loved one, and if you've been reading my blog you know that my mother lost her husband a couple of months ago.

This condition is generally treatable with medication, and it's likely that she'll completely recover.

I just find it funny and sad that my mother literally has a broken heart from her loss.