After serving nine years in the military as a Royal Marines Commando, I needed a new challenge and started striving towards a career as a Commercial Pilot. The flying medical involved an ECG which showed abnormal results. At the time, I was not concerned as the Doctor who performed it was almost certain it was ‘Athletic Heart’. They asked me
For the first time in 12 years, I experienced my first incident of an inappropriate shock. Not just one, but five, one after the other. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. To say it was painful would be a gross understatement. It was a combination of the most painful experience of my life, mixed with the most terrifying. Not only was
I was in my final year of uni studying Sport and Exercise Science and we were in the lab doing ECGs on one another. When my lecturer (Dr David Oxborough) came to check on mine, he thought something was wrong with the monitor or leads. Long story short, the monitor wasn’t broken. After staying behind and completing an Echocardiogram on
From being little I always remember I found running and PE hard. I was good at rounders because I could hit the ball and then race around the posts! But everything else I was bad at. I never had any stamina! I always got worried about things too, it would just come on. I used to get horrible feelings about
In April of this year, I was diagnosed with Long QT Syndrome (LQTS). In the midst of a pandemic, this was the most unwelcome conclusion to my ongoing investigations! In 2001, my sister Ellie died very suddenly whilst on a telephone call with me one morning. I found her body later that day with the phone still in her hand.
I had no idea at the end of the summer holidays in 2011 that the following months would be a defining period of my life. I was thirteen years old and soon to start another year of secondary school. At this time, my favourite activity was undoubtedly exercise – I followed many different sports and enjoyed playing them too. At
Hello. My name is Phoebe and I’m 22 years old. When I was three years old, I was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital to have open heart surgery to repair an Atrial Septal Defect (ASD), other wise known as a hole in my heart. Since then I was very healthy and finished school and college without many difficulties. For
Being in lockdown, being in isolation it’s made me re-experience a life I had before and compare the feelings I have now, to that I had back then. We all live life a little blindly, we all learn from an early age about death, but for many years we’re shielded from it by our parents, then when we do understand
Monday 16th March I celebrated my 12th re-birthday, re-birthday is a term that all cardiac arrest survivors use to celebrate surviving a cardiac arrest. I didn’t really celebrate it this year, maybe ‘cause of this underlying cloud that was shadowing the world. This cloud, this virus COVID-19/ Coronavirus, we first heard about this virus whilst we were on holiday in
Last year, on the 28th of August, it was a normal day for me and I was skating down the road like I do everyday as I skateboard everywhere. Around 5 pm, when I was skating down the road, my heart just stopped with no warning at all! I remember waking up in hospital thinking, “why am I here, did
Today (03/02/2020) marks 25 years since my heart went crazy and hit 268 beats per minute while I was brushing my hair and getting ready for college. 25 years since the doctors battled to save me in resus by stopping my heart twice and rebooting it. 25 years since I was told I was unique and had Wolff Parkinson White
I have always fainted for as long as I can remember, through assembly at school or if I stood up for long periods of time. My parents kept taking me to the GP who said I had low blood pressure which probably explained the fainting. When I was around 11 I started to develop quite severe chest pain on the
