fdk
Content Specialist
- Thread Author
- #1
Some of you may have noticed that I "disappeared" from Administrata for a few weeks - and I wanted to make a post to share a story of why and to raise awareness of the dangers of a sudden cardiac event. So here goes.
I was playing football on the 3rd of April, in a team alongside my brother (a year younger), when I suddenly collapsed. I didn't feel particularly unwell beforehand and there was no "trigger" as such - I just lost consciousness. Unfortunately - it was a little more serious - I hadn't simply fainted, but had suffered a sudden unexplained cardiac arrest. My heart had stopped beating and I effectively lay on the pitch dead.
Thankfully, my teammates realised within seconds that there was something seriously wrong, and by chance, a player who wasn't due to play that day had turned up and was on our substitutes bench, who happened to be a trainee paramedic. He performed CPR on me for close to 10 minutes, awaiting ambulance arrival, during which time he managed to restart my heart (although it stopped and started again several times). Effectively, this lad saved my life - the medical team at the hospital made it undoubtedly clear that had CPR not began so quickly, my heart would not have been able to restart, due to a rare and strange imbalance of electrolytes in my blood.
I spent 18 days in total in hospital, 10 of which were in intensive care, and thankfully through the sheer dedication of the amazing but overstretched National Health Service staff, I was able to pull through and recover. I also underwent tests to try to understand how the electrolytes in my blood had come to be affected in such a way, but the cause of this has not been discovered yet.
I have been fitted with a device called an ICD, which is a tiny stopwatch sized device that is inserted just under the collar bone in order to respond to any strange electrical activity detected within the heart. This unfortunately means that for at least the next year, I am unable to play any contact sports whatsoever, which is sad for me, but I have to be grateful at this point for my life!
This has been a really hard time for me of course, and also is a real shock and a time in which I've had a real epiphany as such in life - I'm in my late 20s, and although I'm overweight, I'm in otherwise relatively good shape - I'm very physically active, I (did) play a lot of sports and rarely drink alcohol. Imagining that something like this would happen in my life so young was just not on my radar whatsoever.
So yeah - I'm running out of words now - still suffering a bit with "brain fog" (some of the effects of the events) and I'm signed off work for the next two weeks, although doctors are keen for me to take longer than that. I'm still not 100%, but am eager to return to work and some form of normality soon - this incident also happened just 2 days after I received a pretty big promotion at work, so whilst they're completely understanding of the situation, it's also had a big effect on the charity that I work for as they're all having to pull together to help out with my work too.
I just wanted to make this post firstly to explain my absence for the past few weeks, but secondly and most importantly to raise awareness of sudden cardiac events like this. Please, please, please, check the location of your nearest public defibrillator, and consider whether you could give up some of your time to take a free training course in CPR - you can even learn in as little as 15 mins, online, from the comfort of your own home: https://www.bhf.org.uk/how-you-can-help/how-to-save-a-life/how-to-do-cpr/learn-cpr-in-15-minutes
Thank you for reading and I appreciate you all so much!
fdk
I was playing football on the 3rd of April, in a team alongside my brother (a year younger), when I suddenly collapsed. I didn't feel particularly unwell beforehand and there was no "trigger" as such - I just lost consciousness. Unfortunately - it was a little more serious - I hadn't simply fainted, but had suffered a sudden unexplained cardiac arrest. My heart had stopped beating and I effectively lay on the pitch dead.
Thankfully, my teammates realised within seconds that there was something seriously wrong, and by chance, a player who wasn't due to play that day had turned up and was on our substitutes bench, who happened to be a trainee paramedic. He performed CPR on me for close to 10 minutes, awaiting ambulance arrival, during which time he managed to restart my heart (although it stopped and started again several times). Effectively, this lad saved my life - the medical team at the hospital made it undoubtedly clear that had CPR not began so quickly, my heart would not have been able to restart, due to a rare and strange imbalance of electrolytes in my blood.
I spent 18 days in total in hospital, 10 of which were in intensive care, and thankfully through the sheer dedication of the amazing but overstretched National Health Service staff, I was able to pull through and recover. I also underwent tests to try to understand how the electrolytes in my blood had come to be affected in such a way, but the cause of this has not been discovered yet.
I have been fitted with a device called an ICD, which is a tiny stopwatch sized device that is inserted just under the collar bone in order to respond to any strange electrical activity detected within the heart. This unfortunately means that for at least the next year, I am unable to play any contact sports whatsoever, which is sad for me, but I have to be grateful at this point for my life!
This has been a really hard time for me of course, and also is a real shock and a time in which I've had a real epiphany as such in life - I'm in my late 20s, and although I'm overweight, I'm in otherwise relatively good shape - I'm very physically active, I (did) play a lot of sports and rarely drink alcohol. Imagining that something like this would happen in my life so young was just not on my radar whatsoever.
So yeah - I'm running out of words now - still suffering a bit with "brain fog" (some of the effects of the events) and I'm signed off work for the next two weeks, although doctors are keen for me to take longer than that. I'm still not 100%, but am eager to return to work and some form of normality soon - this incident also happened just 2 days after I received a pretty big promotion at work, so whilst they're completely understanding of the situation, it's also had a big effect on the charity that I work for as they're all having to pull together to help out with my work too.
I just wanted to make this post firstly to explain my absence for the past few weeks, but secondly and most importantly to raise awareness of sudden cardiac events like this. Please, please, please, check the location of your nearest public defibrillator, and consider whether you could give up some of your time to take a free training course in CPR - you can even learn in as little as 15 mins, online, from the comfort of your own home: https://www.bhf.org.uk/how-you-can-help/how-to-save-a-life/how-to-do-cpr/learn-cpr-in-15-minutes
Thank you for reading and I appreciate you all so much!
fdk
