A distraught mother who thought she was having a heart attack was instead hospitalized with broken heart syndrome — otherwise known as takotsubo syndrome (TTS) — less than a year after her veteran son tragically took his own life.

Dawn Turner, 57, of the U.K., lost her son in August of last year. 

Just last month, the mom of three awoke with “unbearable” chest pains, she said — and called an ambulance, worried she was going into cardiac arrest. But when she arrived at the hospital, doctors told her she was suffering from the effects of grief caused by a broken heart, as news agency SWNS reported. 

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TTS is a temporary, reversible heart condition often triggered by extreme emotional or physical stress, such as grief, fear or severe illness, according to experts.

Symptoms usually mimic a heart attack, with sudden and severe chest pain and shortness of breath the most common — and it primarily affects women over the age of 50.

Turner, of Eckington in Worcester, said, “I was [sitting] downstairs earlier that night and thought I had a bit of indigestion. I went to bed and just couldn’t get comfortable — I was breaking out in a sweat and had heart palpitations.

“Then, around midnight, I had pain down my arm and in my jaw. I was still putting it down to indigestion … My partner Paul asked me if I was all right, and I said, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack.'”

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She said she couldn’t catch her breath — “and my heart felt as though it was missing a beat and then [started] thudding again. For those moments, I truly believed I was having a heart attack.”

She said her partner called emergency services, and an ambulance arrived within five minutes.

“They came in and linked me up to an ECG. They said, ‘Your heart is all over the place — there’s an extra beat, and it’s all over the place,’” she said, as SWNS reported. 

Turner was rushed to the hospital by ambulance.

In emergency care, Turner was also given blood tests.

She added, “They came back and said I didn’t have the enzymes produced from a heart attack in my blood. But they said there [was] something going on.”

After undergoing more tests and seeing a cardiologist, Turner was told she had takotsubo syndrome.

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“I told [the doctor] that my heart feels broken. I told her about [my son] Rob, and she said it’s exactly that. She said it’s a real thing, and that I’d been under so much stress. The body can only take so much, and the grief and the stress can be quite physical.”

Turner’s son committed suicide in August 2025 after struggling to get help with his mental health.

He spent 10 years in the Royal Horse Artillery after joining in 2006, when he worked as an artilleryman.

He did two tours of duty in Afghanistan, she said, and returned to civilian life in 2016 before suffering several worsening health conditions.

Turner, who is also the CEO of a veterans charity called Stepway, “When he left the army, he got married, and they settled down in London. He walked straight into a job as a delivery driver. But then his health took a downward spiral, and he started having digestive troubles.”

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He was eventually told he had PTSD — but those symptoms may be similar to those of mild traumatic brain injury, Turner said.

“He was deaf in one ear from using the guns,” she said. “He realized he was putting so much pressure on his marriage, so he moved back up with me. He started to build himself up — then COVID hit.“

Turner said there were unfortunate delays as her son tried to get access to various services and facilities.

“When people lose loved ones, you’re obviously distraught, but you eventually find closure,” she said, per SWNS. “I found peace when I lost my sister in 2015. But with Rob, I can’t find closure because there’s no justice there.”

Turner is now on the mend and hopes to be fully recovered in a couple of weeks, SWNS reported. 

“Until that moment, I had never really understood that a person could become so overwhelmed by stress and grief that it physically affects the heart,” she shared. “Broken heart syndrome can look and feel like a heart attack. It was a warning sign for me, and for anyone. It can change the shape of one of your heart chambers … it can cause some serious damage.”

She added, “The cardiologist told me that thankfully, my heart itself is healthy and there was no damage, but that it will take around two weeks to a month for my heart to reboot itself.”

Turner was told she needed to rest, seek counseling and make lifestyle changes to reduce stress.

“Things have settled down, and I’m taking things easy — I’m pacing myself now, and I feel a lot better. Paul said, ‘Maybe the extra beat is for Rob. You are carrying on living for him.'”

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Turner said, “That broke me and healed me a little bit all at once.”

Fox News Digital previously reported that broken heart syndrome, which causes the heart to temporarily weaken, has been linked to the brain’s reaction to stress, as studies have found. 

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In an article published in the European Heart Journal in March 2019, Swiss researchers said they found that the syndrome is linked to the way the brain communicates with the heart.

Caused by intense emotional events, TTS is a rare, temporary condition that weakens the left ventricle and disrupts its normal pumping function.

The syndrome causes the heart’s main pumping chamber to change shape and get larger. The heart muscle becomes weaker, and its pumping action loses strength. 

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Symptoms include sudden, intense chest pain, pressure or heaviness in the chest, along with shortness of breath. 

It is treated with beta blockers and blood-thinning medicine to reduce risks of clots and other flareups.

Being a Jewish student in Britain today means living a kind of double life. I go to lectures. I take exams. I navigate seminar rooms and library queues like any other student. But unlike most of my peers, I do all of this while calculating: am I in danger because my Star of David or Kippah (Skull cap) is visible? Will speaking up in this discussion make me a target? Is today the day they’ll be a demonstration outside?

Going to university is supposed to be a student’s main job. Right now, for many British Jewish students, it feels like a side gig — squeezed in around the exhausting, full-time business of simply being Jewish on campus.

My great-grandmother was Lily Ebert. She arrived at Auschwitz at just 20 years old. In a single day, her mother, her younger sister, her youngest brother and over one hundred members of her extended family were murdered — gassed and cremated, their ashes scattered with no grave, no place to mourn. That was July 1944.

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She survived. She came to Britain to rebuild her life, and she did more than survive; she thrived. She built a large and loving family: ten grandchildren, thirty-eight great-grandchildren and even a great-great-grandchild in her final year. She believed Britain would be a safe haven. A place where her family could live openly and proudly as Jews. A country that has learned the lessons of history.

For decades, she traveled across the U.K. speaking in schools, and in her later years she used social media to warn young people that the Holocaust did not begin with violence. It began with words. With small actions. With a shifting atmosphere.

In her final months before she passed away in October 2024, my great-grandmother was horrified. Horrified to see the country she had trusted — after the greatest crime in history, beginning to fail at its most basic duty.

She was right to be horrified. And this week, her warnings feel more urgent than ever.

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British counterterrorism police are now investigating a wave of arson attacks against Jewish sites across London — four in as many days — probing whether Iranian proxies are responsible. Two synagogues and a Jewish charity were torched. And an Iran-linked group threatening to fly drones carrying hazardous substances at the Israeli embassy. 

This all coming only a few weeks after ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity were set alight in Golders Green —  one of the most Jewish areas in the U.K. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has warned that “a sustained campaign of violence and intimidation against the Jewish community of the U.K. is gathering momentum.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed surprise and called the attacks “abhorrent.” But how can he possibly claim surprise? If you tolerate chants of “Globalize the Intifada,” don’t be surprised when the Intifada is globalized.

And throwing money at the problem simply is not a solution. You cannot pay your way out of an Intifada. And we cannot continue to besiege ourselves with security – living behind ever thicker doors and higher fences with barbed wire.

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This violence doesn’t begin with arson. It begins with ideology — and until Britain starts tackling the ideology, no amount of policing or security will stop the flames.

That means banning Iran’s IRGC, who may well be behind this very campaign of attacks. And it means confronting the Muslim Brotherhood, who are radicalizing young people across this country — on campuses, in mosques, in community centers — and may well be recruiting the people lighting these fires.

And it starts closer to home too, on campuses like mine, where week after week, masked demonstrators flood university spaces, chanting slogans that go far beyond political protest into something far darker. Jewish students are singled out in lectures, booed, shouted down, accused of being “baby killers” simply for being Jewish. Many now tuck away their Star of David necklaces and think twice before speaking up in seminars. A Jewish professor had his lecture stormed by masked protesters who screamed abuse, branded him a “war criminal,” and — according to witnesses — threatened to behead him. His only crime was being Jewish and refusing to be intimidated.

And it is not just coming from the students. Too often, academics themselves are part of the problem. On my own campus, the medieval blood libel — the conspiracy that Jews use non-Jewish blood in their rituals — was repeated to students as fact, at one of supposedly the best universities in the U.K.

Beyond campus: an NHS doctor posts “gas the Jews” online and faces no meaningful consequences. Jewish artists are quietly dropped from programs. Jewish events are canceled without explanation. Protests where chants cross into open hatred are allowed to continue unchecked by police.

Individually, each moment can be explained away. Together, they reveal a slow and steady normalization of dangerous Jew-hatred.

In the past year alone, the U.K. recorded the highest number of violent antisemitic assaults per capita anywhere outside of Israel — roughly one for every 2,500 Jews. Jewish schools have warned students not to wear visible symbols on their commute. Jewish teenagers have been assaulted on public transport. Every Jewish institution now sits behind security barriers, guards and locked doors. We are a community under siege.

My great-grandmother spent her life warning that these things begin not with violence, but with silence. With small capitulations. With institutions that hedge, qualify and reach for the language of “context” and “balance” — as if balance is possible when a minority is being targeted.

Britain has a choice. It can honor the lessons it claims to have learned. Or it can allow that silence to continue — and discover, too late, where silence leads.

My great-grandmother, Lily Ebert, survived Auschwitz. She did not survive to see Britain become the country she fled.

Americans are debating whether this war was worth it. Thirteen soldiers have come home in caskets. Hundreds more carry wounds. No one takes that lightly. Least of all someone like me — who chose this country and wears its flag by choice, not by birth.

I was born on the Iranian border and raised in the shadow of its wars. I have seen firsthand what these policies do to the people of this region. I still travel across the Middle East — I was in Erbil, Riyadh and Dubai just recently. I know what people say when the cameras are off. It is not anger at America. It is relief.

But here is what the critics are missing. For millions of people across the Middle East, this war did not start on February 28. It started decades ago. What changed is that a president decided to stop managing the problem and start confronting it. The people of the region noticed. I promise you — they noticed.

What most Americans never hear is what those people actually want. Not war. Not jihad. Not martyrdom. Across the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, 140 million people are under the age of 30. They want what any young American wants: a job, a stable country and a future that is not hostage to someone else’s ideology. New leaders in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kurdistan and Syria are building toward exactly that. When I sit with young professionals in Erbil or Riyadh or Dubai, they talk about startups. They talk about AI. They talk about opportunity.

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And this is not theory. Look at what happens when stability takes root. The UAE was empty desert 50 years ago. Today it is a global center of commerce where millions of people — including Americans — live, invest and build. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq, encircled by hostile forces, built one of the most open societies in the Middle East. It became the largest safe haven for persecuted Christians in the region. And despite a severe economic embargo by Iran-backed forces, Kurdistan built a stable, multi-billion-dollar economy that houses nearly all U.S. forces in Iraq. People move there because it works. These places are not exceptions. They are previews of what the entire region can become.

What stops it, every time, is the same force. Iran-backed armed groups in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen — all taking orders from Tehran, all blocking the future the rest of the region is trying to build. For 45 years, one capital has exported instability to every corner of this region — not because Iranians want it, but because a small circle of men in power profit from it.

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The numbers tell the story. Since February 28, Iran has struck every country in the region that chose partnership with the West — and not one of them fired a shot at Iran. The UAE has absorbed more than 2,800 missiles and drones. Thirteen people were killed. Over 200 were wounded. Kurdistan has been hit more than 700 times. Fourteen dead — including a husband and wife killed at midnight, two daughters left behind. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar — all struck. None of them threatened Iran. Their only offense is that they chose a different future.

These forces have not only been destroying the Middle East. They have been killing Americans for decades.

Every president before this one chose to look away. They minimized the threat. They told Americans it was under control. They left it for the next generation. But ignoring the Middle East always comes with a price. Obama pulled back from Iraq. ISIS filled the vacuum. His nuclear deal sent billions to Tehran and its proxy terror groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Biden called it strategic patience. That patience gave us October 7. The problem never went away. It always got worse. This president made a different choice.

I grew up in this. I did not study it in a seminar. I know what a missile sounds like when it hits a neighborhood school. I know what families look like when they pack a car at 3 in the morning and drive toward the one city that is still standing. The fear across this region is not that America acted. It is that the world will lose interest before anything changes.

The Middle East is not a burden. It is a region of extraordinary talent, ambition and wealth held back by a violent few who have never been weaker than they are right now. 

The people of this region have been asking the world to listen for decades. Perhaps now, it will.