CLOSER NEWS REPORT
Every year, tens of thousands of women in the UK die from heart disease and, according to the latest figures, the rate has risen in younger women. As February marks Heart Month, we speak to two women who were saved by a loved one…
Sitting on the sofa and tucking into a takeaway, Maisie Fox was looking forward to a relaxing evening. It was September 2021, and the 25-year-old was exhausted after spending the day gardening with her mum, Ashleigh, and four-year-old son, Myles.
But as she tucked into her meal, Maisie suddenly fell back on the sofa, her eyes rolled back and she let out a strange snorting sound as Ashleigh looked on in horror.
“I thought Maisie was joking about,” Ashleigh, 53, remembers. “But then I grabbed hold of her and she was unresponsive. It was the worst moment of my life.”
As a healthcare assistant, Ashleigh had had first aid training and thought her daughter was having a seizure. She tried to clear her airway, lifted her onto the floor and then called an ambulance. When she couldn’t find a pulse, the call handler advised her to give chest compressions to keep the blood pumping around Maisie’s body.
Ashleigh says, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, no, I can’t do this to my own daughter’. I’d learnt what to do at work but you never imagine you’ll have to use it. I was looking at Maisie fading away and I was the only one who could save her.”
UNCONSCIOUS
Maisie, who lives in Almondsbury, Gloucestershire, was having a sudden cardiac arrest, where there is an abrupt loss of all heart activity due to an irregular heart rhythm. It causes a person to stop breathing and become unconscious. It’s something experienced by around 30,000 people in the UK every year outside of hospital settings and can be caused by underlying heart conditions.
A spokesperson for The British Heart Foundation, which is urging people to learn CPR through RevivR, its free 15-minute online course, this month, says, “every moment matters when someone has a cardiac arrest.”
Brain tissue starts to die within three minutes after the heart stops, due to a lack of oxygen. Early CPR can more than double a person’s chances of survival, and can buy the time needed before paramedics arrive and provide care.
Maisie was fortunate that Ashleigh was able to perform CPR on her, doing two chest compressions every second for five minutes until paramedics arrived and took over. Ashleigh then waited in the bedroom with Myles while paramedics worked on Maisie. It took them over an hour to stabilise her before she was put in an induced coma and rushed to Bristol Royal Infirmary.
COMA
The cause of Maisie’s cardiac arrest was a leaky heart valve that had been diagnosed two years earlier. Doctors had d
