The past year has been a rough time for corporations that rely on customer service. In particular for the cable and Internet giant Comcast, which has had to deal with the fallout of a recorded maniacal plea by one of its representatives to retain a subscription, other representatives lacing a customer’s bill with profanity after a complaint, and once again being rated the worst company of 2014 by Consumerist.

Luckily for them, it seems Verizon Wireless might have decided to step up to the plate and dethrone them for worst customer service story of the year. In an upcoming civil suit, 53-year-old Angela Hawkins alleges that her phone experience with them was bad enough to send her into a heart attack.

As reported by The Virginian Pilot, Hawkins claims that during a 20-minute back and forth call on Nov. 19 to Verizon Wireless, she was suddenly accused of threatening customer service representatives by the manager on staff. The manager then allegedly told Hawkins that he would call the police on her. After hanging up, Hawkins says she spent several hours lightheaded and anxious that squad cars would soon arrive. "I was just blindsided," Hawkins told The Virginian Pilot. "What a horrible thing to accuse someone of."

The next day, she visited her doctor, where it was revealed to her via EKG that she had apparently suffered a heart attack. For the cherry on top, Hawkins says she only called Verizon Wireless to obtain a $60 credit to her account, and that just two hours after the original call, the manager rang her up to apologize for the “miscommunication,” explaining that a recording of the call found no evidence of any threat, save from the manager. Hawkins is now suing Verizon Wireless for $2.35 million, claiming negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

All of which brings up the curious question of whether a customer service experience can actually be horrible enough to cause a heart attack.

Stress is certainly believed to wreak havoc on heart health by both laypeople and experts, though it might be a matter of perception. In a 2013 study in the European Heart Journal, the authors found that those who felt that chronic stress had negatively impacted their health "a lot or extremely" were twice as likely to suffer from a heart attack than those who felt stress had no adverse effects on their health. When it comes to more immediate stressors, other studies have found that areas which experience natural disasters report more heart woes than before the disaster. Last December, Rutgers researchers published a study in which they compared hospital records in New Jersey soon after Hurricane Sandy hit to previous years. In the two weeks after Sandy, they found, counties which were noticeably hit hard experienced a 22 percent increase in heart attacks compared to the past five years.

But heart attacks, defined as the blockage of blood to heart cells, are a complex beast, so it can be difficult to pinpoint any specific cause for them. And their relationship to stress is still somewhat a mystery. In 2014, a Nature study may have illuminated part of the connection, when it found that chronic stress levels among medical residents predicted the increase of immune cells known as neutrophils and monocytes, which are in turn commonly found in the fatty plague that can clog the heart, The team then conducted experiments with mice, finding these same types of cells in stressed mice. These immune cells are also known to cause inflammation in blood vessels.

For those still on the fence as to whether a single phone call, however terrifying, can induce a clogged heart, perhaps the actual reality is even weirder.

There's because people can suffer from something called "broken-heart syndrome," or stress-induced cardiomyopathy. The condition causes people to experience rapid and severe heart weakness after a highly emotional or physical stressful event, such as possibly being sent to jail for trying to get a discount on your next month’s phone bill. More importantly, despite the lack of blockage, its symptoms of chest pain, shortness of breath, congestive heart failure, and low blood pressure sound eerily familiar to that of the common heart attack, though they often dissipate after a day or two, and it doesn’t seem to reoccur among sufferers. Little is known about how and why it occurs, though.

Then again, Hawkins also claims she underwent surgery to place a stent in one of her arteries following the attack, and that she continues to need heart medication.

Ultimately, it seems like it will be up to the civil court judicial system to determine what exactly happened to Angela Hawkins on that fateful Nov 19. In the meantime, here’s hoping that all our next customer service calls are as stress-free as they can possibly be.