HEALTH
Truly a Sport for ALL Alan Springett M55 BKO (UK) (reprinted with permission from CompassSport, July 2009)
Last year CompassSport mentioned in brief of an amazing occurrence with a happy ending in the Lakes District event. Now the main protagonist of the incident tells CompassSport the whole story:
O
N 13th April 2008, on completion of the Hampsfell Regional event, I suffered Sudden Cardiac Death.
On 13th April 2009, exactly one year later, I successfully completed the Medium leg in the Mixed Ad-hoc class at the JK Relays. A neat trick if you can manage it, but not one I would recommend if you can avoid it! Sudden Cardiac Death, or SCD to its friends (it doesn’t have many!), is pretty much what it says on the tin: Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD): sudden death caused by a coronary event which generally degenerates into ventricular fibrillation (VF), a condition where the heart quivers rapidly rather than beats and consequently cannot supply the body with blood. SCD results in death in about 95% of cases with the chances of survival diminishing markedly the longer the victim is unconscious.
I was out for some minutes… So how did I manage to be among the lucky minority? Well, not through any efforts of mine, apart from my excellent judgement in collapsing at the feet of my wife, who is extremely competent at screaming for help, and adjacent to a defibrillator-equipped and doggedly determined St John ambulance team at an event where a specialist in resuscitation was also competing. So in the first instance my survival was thanks to Jean Barrett and her team from Ulverston, who would not give up, and to the medical expertise amongst my fellow competitors. But it took several minutes to get me back and there was some concern about the possibility of brain damage. However, no-one has yet noticed any difference in the before and after version! (Couldn’t orienteer before, still can’t now!) Then it was blues and twos to Furness General Hospital. So a vote of thanks also to the emergency ambulance team for their speed and for the treatment they gave me en route as I continued to have what was later confirmed to be a major heart attack. Next on the gratitude list are the team who received me at the hospital and who proceeded rapidly to intubate, deep freeze and totally sedate me for 24 hours. They then slowly de-frosted me! Therapeutic Hypothermia is a relatively new treatment now recognised to reduce significantly the chances of brain damage in patients who may have suffered oxygen starvation.
Catherine & Alan Springett
I should say that I have no recollection of any of this. My memory seems to have been wiped from the evening before the heart attack through until a couple of days afterwards. My wife’s early visits were reminiscent of Groundhog Day with me making the same joke and observations each time I saw her. My jokes are pretty weak first time around, and there are only so many times you can say ‘that’s a pretty new top you’ve got on’ and get away with it! The body’s capacity to recover is truly remarkable. Less than 24 hours after being brought round from my induced hypothermia I was transferred out of Intensive Care and I was discharged within the week. Once home in London I took it easy and watched the bruises on my chest and arms recede until it was time for an angiogram. An angiogram allows the doctor to look inside your coronary arteries and find out where and how severe any narrowed areas are. The patient is given a local anaesthetic in the arm or groin, where a catheter (a thin, flexible tube) is passed into the artery. Using an x-ray, the catheter is directed through the blood vessels and into the heart. A special dye is then passed through the catheter and a series of x-rays taken. The dye shows up on x-rays any narrowed areas or blockages in the arteries.
The procedure was straightforward, but being informed subsequently that the arteries in my heart were in such a state that I should sit at home in my carpet slippers until I could be accommodated for by-pass surgery was pretty sobering. But I did that, and just on a month after the heart attack, on 12 May 2008, I underwent quadruple by-pass surgery at the London Bridge Hospital. By-pass surgery may be pretty routine these days, but not from a patient’s perspective. For a hitherto fit and active chap, finding oneself as weak as a kitten, short of breath after the shortest of walks and nervous of coughing because it hurts is quite difficult. I can laugh now at the memory of myself and fellow patients trudging around the hospital corridor in our thrombosis-avoiding flight socks, carrying our containers of body fluids linked to the drains in our chests and having wheezy conversations comparing progress; but it was not funny at the time! However, the hospital team did a great job and my recovery over the subsequent week, including the first physiotherapy to get my lungs expanded again and to start me walking, began DECEMBER 2009 THE AUSTRALIAN ORIENTEER 33
