A 22-year-old woman has suffered seven cardiac arrests within eleven days, requiring her heart to be restarted each time.
Aoife Boyle from Eglinton, County Londonderry, Ireland, first collapsed last month after meeting friends at a pub.
Aoife was placed in the recovery position by a friend who performed CPR after she went into cardiac arrest.
She then spent weeks in three hospitals, two in Northern Ireland and one in England, after suffering seven cardiac arrests within 11 days.
As The BBC reported, Aoife and her family have no history of heart conditions, and she was told she may have caught a virus resulting in inflammation and excess fluid around her heart.
Aoife is now wearing a defibrillator vest while recovering at home and awaits further tests.
Aoife’s mum Tanya Boyle told BBC it was “every parent’s worst nightmare” phone call.
“Aoife was meeting her friends for lunch at a pub, they just got in through the door, they didn’t even make it to sit down, and the next thing she just collapsed and started taking seizures,” she said.
“They rang me straight away, telling me to just get there quick.”
“Within 11 days she had seven cardiac arrests,” Ms. Boyle said.
“Five of them she stopped breathing, and they had to do CPR, two of them they didn’t have to do CPR but they had to sedate her to shock her to get the rhythm of her heart back,” she added.
“When we got to Newcastle, we were told her heart function was between 10 and 20%.”
Aoife said she had little memory of collapsing at the pub.
“It was only when I got to Newcastle and I started on different medications,” Aoife said. “I would have my good and bad days, but then reality slowly started to hit.”
“I wouldn’t have been an anxious person before, but I got really anxious, I didn’t let mummy out of my sight,” she said.
“The cardiac arrests would mostly happen when I was asleep at night so I was terrified to sleep.”
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