At midnight on his birthday, a 53-year-old musician in Mexico got the kind of phone call most fans only dream about: as a birthday gift, he would get to play saxophone with his favorite renowned music group. In the early hours of the morning, he developed sudden chest pain, nausea, and vomiting.
His doctors in the coronary care unit of Mexico City's Instituto Nacional de Cardiología Ignacio Chávez first had to rule out a heart attack. What they found instead was happy heart syndrome, an uncommon form of takotsubo syndrome, a temporary weakening of the heart muscle that in this case followed an intensely positive emotional event. The team described the case in Archivos Peruanos de Cardiología y Cirugía Cardiovascular, a Peruvian cardiology journal, in July 2025. The paper is also indexed on PubMed.
