'My husband died years ago. Last week, I found out grief had been slowly killing me.'

When neonatal nurse practitioner Kirsty Morgan lost her husband Ian in a freak electrical accident in 2010, her heart was broken.

"The fight-or-flight response hit the moment Ian was electrocuted in our bedroom," Kirsty said. "And it never stopped. Not when I performed CPR alone for over 20 minutes. Not during the five days he was in ICU. Not at his funeral. Not in the years that followed."

What began as unrelenting anxiety and insomnia would, years later, lead doctors to diagnose her with rheumatic heart disease. It turned out, Kirsty's broken heart was more than just metaphorical.

In fact, doctors later discovered the damage to Kirsty's heart was likely triggered by what's known as broken heart syndrome — a rare condition where extreme emotional stress physically weakens the heart.

Five years after Ian's death, Kirsty woke up on her bedroom floor with no memory of how she got there. Each time she tried to stand, she fell again, hitting her head, hip, and shoulder.

Watch: Is it perimenopause or am I dying? Post continues after video.

As a senior neonatal nurse, she was used to moving fast, making life-and-death calls for premature babies.

"To come to such a sudden, complete halt was devastating," she said. "I was the one who helped others heal. Now I couldn't even help myself stand up."

Searching for a way to recover, Kirsty made what many thought was an irrational decision, moving to the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland.

Her family couldn't understand why she'd leave everything behind. But for Kirsty, it was the first step toward something that finally felt right.

In Townsville, she connected with a psychiatrist who specialised in PTSD. He was the first to explain what was truly happening inside her brain.

"He said, 'This is severe PTSD. Your amygdala — the stress centre — is enlarged from being overactive. It's shrunk your left prefrontal cortex. That's why you're experiencing personality changes. This is a physical injury from sustained trauma.'"

For the first time, Kirsty felt understood. Her heart had literally broken.

Up north, surrounded by nature, she began to rebuild herself. She bought a property with a waterfall and spent hours walking barefoot on the red soil, watching the light change through the trees.

"For the first time since Ian died, I felt like I could breathe," she said.

But the turning point came one day during meditation.

She visualised her anxiety as a monster. "I stood there in my mind, hands on hips, and said, 'No. You don't get my energy anymore'."

It sounded simple, but something shifted. The monster shrank. From then on, Kirsty developed her own set of grounding techniques, tools she would later record as guided meditations to reduce brain hyperactivity.

"These weren't textbook techniques," she explained. "They came from absolute desperation, from lying in the dark wishing I could just stop feeling everything so intensely."

But while Kirsty worked on healing her mind, her heart was quietly failing.

Doctors discovered her mitral valve was leaking mildly. But after her second bout of COVID in 2022, that mild problem became severe. Kirsty was diagnosed with rheumatic heart disease.

It was then that her cardiologist confirmed what Kirsty had suspected all along: her heart condition was likely caused by broken heart syndrome — a heart condition in which the heart muscle suddenly weakens, often in response to a major emotional or physical stressor.

18-months later, Kirsty's valve stopped working altogether, and at age 49, she underwent open-heart surgery to replace it with a synthetic valve.

"My heart had literally stopped functioning. The leaflets froze instead of tearing apart, which is the only reason I survived," she said.

Three weeks after surgery, Kirsty was recovering at her parents' home when she suddenly collapsed. She woke up in hospital to the sound of alarms and the sight of doctors standing over her. A massive blood clot had formed, crushing her heart.

Listen to this episode of No Filter. Post continues after podcast.

"They were flummoxed as to why I hadn't already had a massive coronary," she said. "My luck was still holding fast."

She was rushed into emergency surgery to remove the clot and spent a week in ICU.

But lying there, surrounded by the sounds that once defined her trauma, something changed.

"My PTSD was flaring relentlessly. Every beep, every alarm was a trigger. But instead of giving up, I developed new techniques right there in that ICU bed, real-time stress-release tools for moments when you can't escape the chaos," she said.

Those methods would become the foundation of her work teaching nurses how to manage stress and emotional overload in high-pressure environments.

"If those techniques could help me survive in ICU, they could help anyone. Nurses carry so much. They need ways to ground themselves before their bodies say, 'no more'," she said.

Kirsty's experience has changed her understanding of broken heart syndrome, which she once considered to be just a poetic metaphor.

"Grief doesn't just break your heart metaphorically," she said. "It breaks it physically.

"It reshapes the muscle. It damages the valves. It changes how blood flows. My heart broke when Ian died, it actually physically broke, and somehow, it had to learn to beat again."

These days, Kirsty looks after her heart, both physically and emotionally, with a kind of fierce reverence. She takes her medication, goes for regular check-ups, and listens when her body whispers instead of waiting for it to scream.

"I'm ruthless about protecting my peace," she said. "I walk barefoot on the earth. I let myself feel everything, the grief, the joy, the fear, without judgment.

"Love doesn't die with someone. It just transforms. The love I had for Ian is still here, woven into everything I do."

Kirsty has written a book about her experience, Walking the Broken Path.

Image: Supplied.