Cornwall nurse found dead in Portugal Airbnb

A nurse at the Nightingale Covid Hospital died from taking drugs for the first time on a weekend with her boyfriend in Portugal, an inquest heard. Sarah Elizabeth Curr, 46, was discovered lifeless with her Swedish boyfriend in an apartment in Travessa São Sebastião, near Porto Cathedral, on January 26 last year.

An inquest into her death, which took place in Truro today (July 1), heard how the couple had checked in the day before after flying to the popular tourist destination from London. When they failed to check, the owner of the apartment entered and discovered Sarah and her boyfriend dead. The police were called and heroin, MDMA and other illegal drugs were found in the apartment.

A Portuguese post mortem examination found lethal levels of opiates in the bodies of Sarah and her boyfriend. After her death, Sarah’s body was repatriated by her family to Cornwall, where she came from, and a second autopsy was carried out at the Royal Cornwall Hospital.

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Pathologist Dr Thomas Grigor told the inquest that his findings were similar to those of his Portuguese colleagues and said that drug use in an “opiate-naive” person – meaning not used to taking recreational drugs – was likely to result in one heart. and pulmonary insufficiency.

Rachel Gosling, one of Sarah’s two sisters who attended the hearing, said the NHS worker was a vegan, keen runner and swimmer and yoga practitioner who worked hard and volunteered as a carer all her life.

She told the inquest that Sarah came from a large family in Cornwall and had two brothers and two sisters. She lived in the Blackheath area of ​​London where she had a great network of friends. She worked as a nurse in the emergency department at a local hospital for many years before deciding to become a nursing professor at King’s College Hospital, while volunteering in Singapore and Somaliland.

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Ms Gosling told the inquest that during the Covid pandemic, Sarah worked at Nightingale Hospital during the worst weeks of the global pandemic. Around Christmas 2022, she caught Covid herself and missed the festive period with her family, so after recovering she decided to spend a weekend in Porto with her boyfriend a month later.

She told the inquest: “We were not aware of uncontrolled substance abuse. Sarah’s work was very demanding. She lived alone and provided childcare support for her extended family. It is unlikely that he could have functioned as he did if he had been an ordinary person. drug user”.

The inquest heard how Sarah told loved ones in a family WhatsApp group that she had arrived safely in Porto and sent them some pictures of the historic city, which turned out to be the last they heard from her .

Concluding in a drug-related death, Deputy Coroner for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly Guy Davies said the circumstances of how or why Sarah and her boyfriend decided to buy drugs during their weekend break in Porto remained unknown, but it was clear that the work was hard. The NHS nurse had not been used to them and was suffering from fatal opiate toxicity as a result.