My wife thought I’d died
When the rock ’n’ roll legend collapsed during lockdown, his wife Joyce feared the worst. Now a pacemaker has given him a new lease of life, he tells KATHERINE HASSELL
WHEN Marty Wilde woke up on the bedroom floor of his Hertfordshire home three months ago with no recollection of how he got there, he knew something was very wrong. “I tried to put my arms up to heave myself onto the bed and I couldn’t,” he recalls. “I didn’t have the energy.”
Marty, 81, had a bleeding head, black eye and bruises all over. “I’m 6ft 3in, so it was like the Statue of Liberty going over,” he chuckles. “We don’t have carpets, either.We have wooden floors. They didn’t cushion the fall.”
Not wanting to worry his wife of 60 years, Joyce, 79, who was downstairs, Marty fumbled for his mobile phone and called youngest son, landscape gardener Marty Jnr. “I said, ‘I don’t know what it is, but I’m in trouble’, and just lay on the floor until he came. He’s 10 minutes away and as strong as an ox, so lifted me up.”
Marty’s blood pressure was dangerously low, so paramedics took him to hospital. After a Covid test before admission, Marty then had a CT scan to discount brain injury. Doctors diagnosed atrial fibrillation – a recurrence of a condition Marty thought had been fixed a few years before.
ATRIAL fibrillation (AF) is an irregular and often abnormally fast heart rhythm due to a malfunction in the electrical impulses controlling the heart’s conduction system. A resting heart rate should be 60-100 beats per minute. With AF, it can be much higher, reducing the heart’s efficiency and leading to palpitations, dizziness, tiredness and shortness of breath.
Affecting around 1.4 million in the UK, the problem is more common in older people – it affects one in 10 over-65s – and in men.
Although not life-threatening, AF can, if left untreated, increase the risk of blood clots and stroke, so blood thinners are often prescribed, as are beta-blockers to control heart rate.
Marty had first been diagnosed with AF six years ago after a visit to the dentist. “It’s one of the few things I’m really scared of, so if I have work on my teeth I have a general anaesthetic,” he admits. “One day, after I’d been treated and came round, the anaesthetist said, ‘You’ve got an irregular heartbeat’.
“It had been fluctuating under the anaesthetic. I didn’t have a clue. Most people don’t. Now and again you take a deep breath as if you’ve not had enough air. I put that down to getting older. If I’d just gone for normal treatment, who knows what would’ve happened?” Marty saw a consultant cardiologist and had a procedure called cardioversion. “They put you out, put electrical pads on your chest and deliver a small controlled shock with a defibrillator to get it back into the right rhythm,” he explains. This failed to regulate the heart rhythm, so he had an ablation.
Under local anaesthetic, surgeons take catheters and “go in through the blood vessels in your groin”, explains Marty.The catheters are moved into position in the heart and radiofrequency energy or freezing is used to destroy areas causing the abnormal heart rhythm.
Marty, who found fame with hits such as Endless Sleep in 1958 and A Teenager in Love in 1959, thought he was cured until his collapse in April, after which he was told he’d probably need a pacemaker. He was sent home with medication and instructions to take it easy.The next day, he came downstairs, sat on the sofa and said: “I feel a bit sick.”
His wife Joyce, formerly of The Vernons Girls, continues the story. “I went to get a bowl and the next moment I heard him groan. When I got to Marty, I thought we’d lost him. There was no waking him up. He was out for four minutes, it felt like an eternity. It was terrifying.”
Joyce called 999 and Marty came round. He was taken to hospital, had a pacemaker fitted three days later and was discharged within 24 hours.
The device is inserted in a pocket of skin below the collarbone and electrode leads connect it to the heart through a vein. When needed, it sends electrical impulses to make the heart beat. “For four to six weeks you mustn’t lift or stretch your arms in the air as it’s important not to dislodge the leads,” says Marty.
It meant no golf for a while.The 1950s idol credits the sport with keeping him fit. “Walking two or three miles, three or four times a week, is key,” he says.
Going forward, Marty will need another cardioversion to get the heart back into rhythm, but even so, he enthuses: “I feel like a new man. I feel reinvigorated.The pacemaker is doing what my heart wasn’t and, because it’s linked to the hospital (for remote monitoring) it makes you feel much more secure. It’s a technological marvel.”
AFTER a month, Marty was back on the fairway: “You are nervous taking your first swing, but you get used to it.” Marty’s grateful for medical advancements. Both his parents had heart problems. “My father, Reg, had angina and died from a heart attack when he was 48,” he says. Marty was only 21 at the time.
“My mum, Jessie, had a heart valve defect and irregular heartbeat. They couldn’t operate as it was less than a 50/50 chance. She had three strokes and the last one killed her at 84.”
Musically, the beat goes on for Marty with a new single, Running Together. His other children (1980s pop icon Kim, guitarist/producer/ songwriter Ricky and singersongwriter Roxanne) join him on the track. “Music keeps me young. It’s my lifeblood,” says the grandfather of nine and greatgrandfather of two.
“I’ve been so fortunate,” he adds. “If I’d passed out minutes earlier, I’d have fallen down those stairs and probably wouldn’t be here now.
“I’m very grateful to the hospital staff and paramedics. People like me are put on a pedestal but with Covid the public have been focused on the real stars: paramedics, surgeons and nurses working in difficult conditions. They’re the ones who deserve the praise.”
● Running Together, is released on July 31. The album of the same name is out on October 2.Visit martywilde.com.
● For more on heart and circulatory diseases visit bhf.org.uk