After her mum died, Juliet Sullivan’s put her endless feelings of dread and breathlessness down to grief-fuelled panic attacks. Even when she found herself months later on all-fours on her bedroom floor, white-faced and panicking, Juliet was convinced she was suffering from anxiety. After all, the day before she had attended her mother’s inquest by video conference where the verdict was given as death by suicide.
While Juliet told herself she just needed to let the overwhelming feeling pass, her worried daughter Kerri called a health hotline, where the operator ordered the pair to go straight to the hospital. Just a few hours later, Juliet lay in the emergency room feeling recovered from her panic attack and ready to go home. But then doctors delivered a bombshell – her ordeal had been nothing to do with anxiety. They believed that what she had been experiencing were the symptoms of a heart attack and she needed to be urgently admitted. The team were so concerned about her; they wouldn’t even let Juliet carry her own bag.
As someone who didn’t smoke, drank moderately and was otherwise fit and healthy with no history of heart disease, she and her daughter were left in disbelief at the news. ‘I think I might even have laughed because it was just so preposterous to me,’ Juliet, 58, tells Metro over Zoom from her home in Canada. ‘The day before, I had done a big hill walk – I marched up it! I also did yoga, so as far as I was concerned, it was impossible for me to have a heart attack.’.
Despite their initial assessment, doctors soon discovered that Juliet hadn’t actually had a heart attack. Instead her heart had significantly changed shape and she was diagnosed with Takotsubo syndrome (TTS). Often known as ‘broken heart syndrome’, because it can occur in people who are experiencing overwhelming physical or emotional stress, according to the British Heart Foundation, TTS affects up to 5,000 people in the UK every year.
Juliet had a complicated relationship with her mother Margaret. Although she now lives on the west coast of Canada with her husband Lee, she had grown up in Brighton and experienced heartbreak throughout much of her life. Margaret was neglectful, addicted to alcohol, severely depressed and spent years in a psychiatric institution. Juliet, now an author and mother of two adult children, remembers lying in her parents’ bed aged nine with a crying father after being told that they were splitting up. He left shortly after and neither Juliet nor sister Karen saw him for two years.
‘After dad left, I stopped washing myself. I only remember this because one day at school, I was repulsed by an unknown odour so bad that it made me gag, and some days later, a boy asked me when was the last time I had had a wash? I was mortified, crushed,’ she explains. Meanwhile, Margaret was largely absent. On one occasion, after returning home from school, Karen and Juliet attempted to make chips from some old potatoes, which started a chip pan fire. Karen was badly burned and Juliet ran to the pub down the road to get her mum to stop the fire only to find she wasn’t there.
Juliet was 13 when her mother Margaret made an attempt to kill herself. It wasn’t the first time, but the first Juliet had experienced after she came home to find the bathroom reeking of vomit and her mother absent. It emerged that Juliet’s grandmother had taken her to hospital. ‘The days afterwards, I felt a sense of terror. Nobody bothered to explain mental illness to me and for eight months after that, my mother lived in a psychiatric cross award named H block. We visited her once a week. It was too hard on us to go more often,’ recalls Juliet, who has written a book about her experience called What Becomes of the Broken Hearted.
The sisters lived with their dad until Margaret was released, then when Juliet was 16, she left home and moved to Finland, before moving to Canada in her thirties – something that she describesit as ‘clearly a pattern in my life of running away’. Yet despite their geographical distance and their complicated relationship, Juliet and Margaret would speak regularly. In August 2022, Juliet asked her mother, who often complained of feeling lonely and isolated, to come and stay in Canada with her.
However, it turned out to be a ‘living nightmare’, recalls Juliet. Even on the day her mother arrived the pair fought. ‘Our arguments were trivial, usually because she didn’t like the tone in my voice or if I had disagreed with something she said,’ explains Juliet. ‘To be honest, I had little tolerance for my mum’s drama or demands. She was often angry, whether that was with another person, me, or her own situation. She had failing eyesight and was, naturally, frustrated by that. In retrospect, I was not as sympathetic as I could have been.’.
