TWS - Running, Broken Heart Syndrome, and Barbie
• public
📝 Rx
Hi friends,
This last week has been kind of chaotic, I started to do a 150km (~93miles) virtual marathon for the Fred Hollows Foundation which focuses on ending world blindness (go team Kangaroo Jack!). The idea is to run the entire thing little by little within a month, thing is I've never run before and because I've been consuming a lot of David Goggins content, day 1 I full sent it and ran 7 miles first thing in the morning with no training. I was fine that day BUT it's 3 days later and my calves are still suuuper sore lol, I can walk better now but I was waddling like a penguin the day after haha. Some friends have told me this was dumb, and it probably was to be fair, but no regrets on my end, I was genuinely surprised how far I could push myself with no prep. Just hoping to recover quick to run the rest of the marathon 😅. Anyways, this week I've been going through a mix of endocrine and resp content for STEP. Not a super huge fan of resp, but I think it's mainly because of the formulas, at least seeing it for a second time it starts to make more sense than last year.
Catch you next week!
🩻 Diagnosis of the Week:
Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy (Aka Broken Heart Syndrome)
What is it:
A really interesting condition where your heart actually changes because of how extremely negative your mood is, particularly after a significant loss. The name itself, "Takotsubo," comes from the Japanese word takotsubo meaning "octopus pot" because the left side of the heart ends up looking like an octopus pot. The constant extreme stress causes physical changes to the heart, making it wider, and so it stops being able to pump blood as well as before. Imagine hugging someone with your arms locked behind them, you'd be able to squeeze quite hard. Now picture trying to hug someone where your arms don't meet in the back. You wouldn't be able to squeeze anywhere near as hard because the wider you go the less pressure you can squeeze with, same thing with the heart. This can usually be fixed via therapy and medications. On the other hand, it can also become so bad that this can result in heart failure, giving literal meaning to dying of a broken heart.
Key signs:
- Recent extremely stressful event (loss, divorce, recurrent panic attacks)
- Angina (chest pain)
- Dyspnea (hard time breathing because blood is not flowing well and backing up into lungs)
- Syncope (blacking out from blood not being pumped well enough to the brain)
🤓 Dose of the Week
Anki Cards: 2,569 reviews
Miles Run: 7
Movies Watched: 2
- Barbie - I'm definitely not the target demographic for this but I thought it was ok at best, not great. The art style was really cool though, loved the aesthetic of the Barbie world.
- Grand Turismo - Genuinely loved this. Very much into both video games and racing so it was really special seeing the story of someone go from playing a racing sim at his house to racing and placing in 24hrs of Le Mans. Deserves a rewatch 100%
☕️ Refills
No videos this week 🥲 I recorded one on tracking my mood every single day for my first year of med but I'm still editing it. Also working on a Barbie podcast to publish next weekend, we'll see how that one goes.