A student who had been diagnosed with anxiety collapsed and died of an exceptionally rare heart condition just hours later, an inquest heard.
In the days before she died, Mariona Garcia Ramon had been examined by two different medics who both put her shortness of breath down to anxiety.
But post-mortem tests revealed that although the 26-year-old was otherwise in the peak of health, one of her three heart arteries was blocked, which had caused the breathlessness and eventually triggered her collapse.
The inquest at Brighton and Hove Coroner’s Court, at Woodvale, heard how her boyfriend, Norbert Bare, had run back home after their flatmate called him to say Mariona was unconscious and was performing CPR on her when the paramedics arrived.
They rushed her from their home in Hereford House in Kemp Town to the Royal Sussex County Hospital where doctors tried to revive her for more than an hour.
But at 1.20pm on May 2, she was pronounced dead.
Pathologist Dr Mark Howard, who carried out the autopsy, said he had been very surprised to find the blockage in her artery. He said this would probably have caused her breathlessness because blood unable to get through would have started to fill her lungs.
He said: “She was incredibly fit and healthy apart from one blockage so she would have been able to compensate. It would have hidden the acute signs to a degree.
“There were periods where her heart function returned and cleared the congestion in her lungs.
“She was just incredibly unlucky to develop the fatty plaque where she did at such a young age.”
He said that although breathlessness could be a symptom of cardiac problems, it was also an indicator of many other conditions, and there was nothing in Mariona’s history, such as drug use, family history or other symptoms, to suggest a cardiac diagnosis.
And to illustrate how rare this would be, he said of the 5,751 female patients treated by the Sussex Cardiac Centre since it opened in 1999, only one woman under the age of 30 had suffered a heart attack.
Dr Howard added: “I wish I could give a reason why it has happened but there’s no reason in pathological terms. It’s both unbelievably rare and unbelievably unlucky.”
A couple of days before, on April 30, Mariona had called Norbert from the Walkabout in West Street where she worked asking him to pick her up as she was feeling unwell.
Norbert insisted she come with him to the walk in surgery at the top of Queen’s Road – a short walk, but one she could not manage without several breathing stops.
At reception, she checked the box to say she had chest pain which prompted nurse practitioner Charlotte Walsh to see her straight away.
