Trainee doctor took fatal drug overdose after boyfriend's arranged marriage blow

An inquest was told Jennifer Suraweera, 26, was found dead fewer than three weeks after her boyfriend and colleague Dr Jawad Usman left Britain to meet another woman after his visa expired.

Dr Usman, also a trainee doctor, called from Pakistan to say he was having an arranged marriage. Miss Suraweera was due to start a new job at Barnsley District Hospital, South Yorkshire the day after her death.

Miss Suraweera, who lived with her brother and mother in a rented flat at Pogmoor, Barnsley, took a fatal dose of the beta-blocker drug Propranolol which is used to treat hypertension.

She was drowsy and unresponsive when her brother Raj returned from work and fearing she had meningitis he called an ambulance, but she died later that day in Barnsley Hospital.

Raj Suraweera, himself a trainee doctor, said his sister had never mentioned the drug and after she died he searched her possessions but could not find any. He told the Sheffield hearing: "It was a big shock for me. She had been stressed and after Usman called from Pakistan she didn't want to tell anyone.

"She's not someone who showed any sign of weakness in the past. She was a very tough person." The inquest heard the troubled doctor, who was on a six-month training course at a Barnsley GP practice, claimed to be suffering health problems before she died on February 2.

She was found collapsed in her consulting room last November and rushed to hospital but later recovered. However, she took time off work in January and fell further behind with her work.

Dr Lynne Sykes of the Worsbrough Medical Centre who was training Jennifer said: "After two days back she had more time off, first due to snow, then a fall in her bathroom, then 'flu', then laryngitis and then gallstones.

"I was extremely dubious that the information being given was not right and that there was something she was not telling me. I was under the impression something was troubling her. We discussed her collapse but she made no mention of Propranolol."

Jennifer's mother Sumithra Suraweera told the inquest her daughter found the training "stressful". She said: "She was coming in really late but she said she wanted to learn." She was late back to work after the New Year because of the snow, having travelled to Glasgow where she had studied and had friends.

Mrs Suraweera said Jennifer was due to travel to India in January for a friend's wedding but she never went. She last saw her trainer Dr Sykes on January 5.

Her mother had no idea she had been absent from the GP's surgery for more than three weeks that month. "I didn't know she was not going to the surgery. I thought she went every day."

She said she had never met Dr Usman. On the day she died Jennifer had been shopping with her mother in Barnsley to buy presents for the doctors who treated her at the hospital when she fell ill in November.

They returned to the flat and Jennifer went to bed saying she felt tired. Raj Suraweera found his sister when he came back from work. Mrs Suraweera said her daughter gave no indication she was about to take her life.

"She seemed perfectly normal, she was choosing all the thank you cards," she said.

Assistant deputy coroner Donald Coutts-Wood said further inquiries had been made to ascertain how Miss Suraweera obtained the beta-blockers but had proved fruitless.

The doctor had not been prescribed the drugs but it was possible she could have written her own prescription or simply bought them via the internet.

For the last month of her life it was difficult to discover what she had been doing although she clearly was not at work.

Returning an open verdict, the coroner said: "Nobody has given me any indication she intended to cause herself any harm."

He said her reasons for taking an overdose were a "complete mystery".