00:00 I'm Daisy Devan, I'm an Area Safety and Security Manager and First Aid Trainer for Whitbread
00:05 and I had an idiopathic cardiac arrest at home on the 13th of June 2022. I was doing a bit of work
00:12 on my laptop, my husband Eamon was upstairs and he heard some strange noises and he came down and
00:18 he found me unresponsive and not breathing. I heard some strange noises, I came down to see
00:24 what was going on and I found Daisy on the sofa over there, sat there not breathing,
00:29 kind of blue in the face. I picked her up, put her on the floor, dialed 999 and had to give her
00:34 chest compressions for 11 minutes until the ambulance crew arrived. Jeremy, I'm Senior EMT
00:39 with the East of England Ambulance Service. I had been in the property, looked on the monitor for
00:46 around about 11 minutes and I started to feel extremely unwell and I said to my colleagues
00:54 that I needed to get out. They did what they call an ECG on me and found that I was having
01:00 a serious heart attack. My colleagues then started to treat both Daisy and myself. I was on the back
01:10 of the ambulance, Daisy was still in here. I didn't go back to working on the road. February,
01:16 lo and behold, Daisy gets brought into hospital because she's not feeling very well and so that
01:21 was the first time I'd seen her. We kind of had the conversation, didn't we, about whether our
01:26 house was really unlucky because these two terrible things had happened or actually whether we were
01:32 really lucky because both myself and Jeremy survived. I think that that is a huge credit
01:37 to your colleagues at the East of England Ambulance Service and to, of course, my lovely husband who
01:43 did those life-saving measures to keep me alive. Obviously I teach first aid for a living and
01:49 that's what I do for my job and I just never ever imagined that I would be the person that would be
01:54 needing CPR and absolutely as you said that those getting that alternative blood pumping around the
01:59 body, you know, irreversible brain damage starts to occur after only two minutes and thankfully for
02:04 me somebody was just upstairs that knew what to do and he was able to give me that best possible
02:10 chance of survival. On that day for those two episodes to happen I think everybody was there
02:17 the right time, the right place and we all, well both myself and Daisy, both received outstanding
02:26 treatment really. So we're working really well with the British Heart Foundation this month to
02:31 try and raise awareness for learning CPR for their Heart Awareness Month. So they can go on to the
02:37 British Heart Foundation website and it takes about 15 minutes. There's an online tool where
02:40 you can learn CPR at home, you can practice on pillows, you can share the knowledge with your
02:45 friends and the more life-saving people that are out there the better the outcome for people like me.
02:50 Bystander CPR is of critical importance to people that are in cardiac arrest. It is that initial
02:59 pumping of somebody's chest and pumping around the remaining oxygenated blood to keep the brain
03:06 alive. It's all about keeping the brain alive so even just by doing CPR can be enough to save
03:14 somebody's life. I think it's worth thinking about as well that the vast majority of cardiac arrests
03:19 happen at the home. You know I think it's something like 80% are happening inside the
03:24 people's homes so it's your loved ones or you that would be responding to that kind of emergency.
03:29 So taking that 15 minutes to use an online tool to figure out what it is you're supposed to do
03:33 then at least then you can give your loved one the best possible chance of survival.
03:37 You may never have to use it for the rest of your life but there may be that one instance that you
03:44 are going to be the lifesaver for somebody.
03:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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