The response to my first blog post a year and a bit ago was fantastic. Surviving cardiac arrest was like a weird dream and all sorts of thoughts had gone through my head, so putting them down on a blog post was a helpful experience on its own. But the reaction I got blew me away, with well wishes coming from all over the globe.
Since that post, my life has gone back to relative normality, so I haven't posted since. I didn't feel that dwelling on what happened would help me or my family. Instead, I've tried to get on with my life as it was before - I'm thankful that other than six-monthly check-ups at the hospital I've done pretty well at getting back into the old routine.
However one vital part of that routine will forever remind me of what happened on 1 January 2015, and it's something that I will always be grateful for and I've not once considered giving up now I'm back to full health. My cardiac arrest happened at my 58th parkrun; a weekly 5km run round a local park on a Saturday morning. I had discovered parkrun in 2012, and soon it became an important part of my week. Shortly before New Year's Day 2015 I'd worked out that all being well I would join the "100 club" later that year - a small(ish) group of people who have completed 100 runs, that parkrun recognise with a free running shirt to mark the achievement.
The unfortunate events of 1st January meant that for a while it looked like I would never make it to 59 parkruns. Six months of rehab however got me back to fitness, and I successfully completed my return to parkrun on 8th August 2015, in a not-too-shabby time of 28m47s. Since then I've been back as often as I can, and on 5th November 2016 I finally reached that landmark and completed my 100th parkrun. My cardiologist had given me the sensible advice to take it easy on my return to running and said that it would be unlikely I could ever run as quickly as I did before the arrest. However as I've felt stronger and stronger over the last few months my times have been improving - and 3 of my last 4 runs have been quicker than my "pre-cardiac-arrest-personal-best"! In a neat piece of unintentional timing I finished my 100th run in 23m31s, exactly four minutes faster than that ill-fated run on New Year's Day.
Every time I go back to parkrun I'm reminded of the fabulous people at Hilly Fields who kept me alive - it was only their amazingly quick thinking and teamwork to perform CPR on me for over ten minutes that gave me the chance to pull through and get back to running. I'm delighted to see that even in the short time since it happened, parkrun as an organisation have taken steps to encourage the presence of AEDs (Automated External Defibrillators) at their events - these fantastic machines massively increase the chances of survival from cardiac arrest and are surprisingly easy to use!
I plan to carry on with my routine and will be back at parkrun at next Saturday. The next landmark for me is 108 runs, as that will be 50 "bonus" runs since being given my second chance. Do parkrun do a t-shirt for that?!
Back From The Brink
Tuesday, 8 November 2016
Sunday, 2 August 2015
Back From The Brink - How I Survived a Cardiac Arrest at 34
My first
memory of 2015 is from 8th January, and it's of my family standing
around my bed in a hospital room, trying to explain to me what had happened. Not a lot was sinking in as I was still
heavily sedated, but they were telling me that I'd collapsed after a run on New
Year's Day, that I'd been rushed to hospital, and that they had found a
complete blockage within one of the arteries in my heart. That still seems surreal to me now, so imagine how it
sounded when waking up after a week sedated in a hospital bed.
I tried to
piece together what happened but my short term memory was completely wiped –
apparently a common occurrence for people that have been through a trauma, and
an example of the body's "self-defence" mechanism. I didn't even remember starting parkrun, let alone
finishing two of them (I did 5km at Peckham Rye then another 5km at Hilly
Fields)… and in fact the end of December was also a complete blank as well. It's probably just as well I have no memory
of the day, as the story got more and more frightening as people relayed what
had happened to me.
I finished
the second parkrun, was in line to have my time recorded, complained to my
friend that I wasn't feeling well, and then collapsed to the ground. My heart had gone into "ventricular
fibrillation" – where for whatever reason it just couldn't pump enough
blood round my body… and then nothing.
It stopped beating. This was a
full-on cardiac arrest, that thing you hear about in the news but never imagine
happening to you at 34 years of age.
I was
incredibly lucky to be quickly surrounded by some amazing people… my fellow
parkrunners came to my rescue and went into life-saving mode. A team of four of them administered CPR for
nearly 15 minutes while we waited for an ambulance. They somehow kept my blood
(and crucially, oxygen) pumping round my body, which meant that when the
ambulance arrived they were able to 'shock' my heart back into a normal rhythm and
keep me alive.
I now know
that surviving an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is rare, surviving for over 15
minutes without a regular heartbeat is extremely rare, and making a full
recovery without brain damage or ongoing heart problems is almost unheard
of. They put my chances of survival somewhere between 2% and 4% (thankfully this statistic wasn't passed onto my family
at the time!). The realisation of how
lucky I was has been made even more significant by the tragic events in Belgium
where footballers Gregory Mertens and Tim Nicot both died within a few days of
each other after cardiac arrests, and closer to home at Whyteleafe FC when
Tonbridge player Junior Dian also died
after collapsing during a pre-season friendly.
There’s no
doubt that I survived only because of the intervention of my fellow runners,
who thankfully had been trained on life-saving techniques. Learning CPR really is straightforward, yet
the majority of people sadly wouldn’t know where to start. I was really impressed to see my former
employer Barclays
put 10,000 members of staff through CPR training recently, and I really
hope other big organisations follow suit.
Photo: Finishing the Bath Half Marathon in 2013
The ambulance
took me to King's College Hospital, where they performed an angiogram, which is
basically a camera that went into the artery through my wrist, all the way into
my heart, where they found the blockage.
They cleared it, and re-enforced the artery with a bit of what I call
'scaffolding' but which is actually called a stent. It lines the artery wall, keeping the vessel
open for blood to start pumping again as normal. So what caused the blockage? Well that's the bit nobody has ever really
been able to explain. All of the scans
showed the rest of my heart to be in "pristine condition" (not my
words but those of the consultant) which suggests it wasn't heart disease or
anything related to lifestyle. Most
likely it was something genetic that meant that bit of my heart was
pre-disposed to problems, or it could have been some event from earlier in my
life that damaged the artery, unbeknown to me at the time.
Whatever
caused it, the biggest positive was that they fixed the problem, and that all
the scans were showing my heart to be functioning normally after the operation.
For the first
month after the arrest, I couldn't even imagine running again. I was in hospital 23 days, and when I was
finally discharged my legs were so weak I couldn't walk to the end of my road
without feeling like I'd done a marathon.
Apparently for many people, the hardest part of recovery from any sort
of heart attack is psychological – that worry about it happening again. This is where the hospital did something
amazing to give me peace of mind – they fitted me with my own personal
defibrillator. I have a small device
implanted into my side, with a cable that runs across my heart, and this device
monitors my heart activity. If my heart
ever goes into a dangerous rhythm, it will administer a shock that should
effectively "reboot" my heart and get it working again. This means that if it did happen again, I
wouldn't have to rely on my team of life-savers or the appearance of an ambulance
to get my heart back into a normal rhythm.
As weird as it sounds to have a device sewn into your chest, it provides
amazing reassurance to know you have your own little insurance policy should
anything go wrong again.
Before New
Year’s Day I’m not sure I even knew what a defibrillator really was, but now I
know that they really are the difference between life and death for a lot of people
that go through similar events to the one I had. Both the British Heart Foundation and the
London Ambulance Service are trying to raise awareness of how vital they are,
and the LAS generously donated a defibrillator to Hilly Fields parkrun after my
arrest. They now have one on standby at
every run, and although hopefully it will never be needed, it’s great for the
runners and organisers to know they have the equipment they need to potentially
save another life if the worst was to happen.
Photo: My medication. More pills than Pete Doherty!
My implant,
together with the excellent cardiac rehabilitation programme run by King's
College Hospital, has rebuilt my confidence in running. I started with a few quick walks on the
treadmill, and within a few months I had built up to being able to run properly
again. I'm now at the point where I want
to make my return to running out and about, and am planning my return to
parkrun on Saturday August 8th.
I may be quite a bit slower than I used to be, but the beauty of parkrun
is that it doesn't matter. It's a free 5km run that happens in parks all over
the world, and it's a great way of gently getting back into a regular
running habit. As tempting as it is to
go back to Hilly Fields and run with the people who saved my life, I've opted
for the familiar (and more importantly, flat!) surrounds of my local park in
Dulwich.
The question
I’ve had most regularly since this all happened is “has it changed your outlook
on life?” It’s a very difficult question
to answer, but it has certainly made me realise what is most important in
life. Learning so much about heart
problems has made me in awe at the work that leading charities do, such as C-R-Y
(Cardiac Risk in the Young) who offer cardiac screening to people
under 35, to try and detect any heart abnormalities. Amazingly they find an abnormality in 1 in
every 300 people they test, and by detecting it at an early stage they can make
sure the individuals get the treatment they need to hopefully prevent anything
serious from happening.
It’s still
the early stages of my recovery so I will be taking it easy and sticking to 5km
parkruns for the time being. However if
things go well I would like to do a longer event and raise some money for
charity. In the meantime I’m trying to
raise awareness and I urge you all to have a look at some of the information at
the links below.
Thanks for
reading, and if you feel like lending some moral support, I will be at Dulwich parkrun on Saturday 8th
August. I’ll be the one in the pink and
blue Dulwich Hamlet FC shirt so should be easy to spot!
British Heart
Foundation: https://www.bhf.org.uk/
Cardiac Risk
in the Young (C-R-Y): http://www.c-r-y.org.uk/
London
Ambulance Service: http://www.londonambulance.nhs.uk/calling_999/emergency_heart_care/cardiac_arrest.aspx
Special
thanks go to:
My Hilly
Fields Team of life savers: Siggy, Liam, Anne and Bhupinder
My 1st
Jan running partners: Darren and Gila, who had the unenviable job of breaking
the news to my girlfriend Alex and keeping her company in hospital
My ICU nurses
(I don’t remember you but I’m told you were awesome): Steph and Mike
The KCH
Cardiac Rehab Team: especially the "Thursday Team" of Annie, Phillippa, Tony and Ian
Everyone who
visited me in January, sent cards, brought grapes, and generally helped keep me
sane while in hospital for nearly a month
And last but
definitely not least, my partner Alex, probably the only person who had a worse
January than I did. She was amazing
through the whole thing and has been unbelievably supportive. She even approves of my return to parkrun!
I can be contacted at neil.m.cole@gmail.com - feel free to get in touch that way, or comment below if you have any questions or comments about my experience.
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