Vital training that can make all of us life savers

I still get the shivers thinking about the young woman I helped — what if I hadn’t known CPR?

UNLIKE most of Britain, I am not much of a football fan, but the shocking events of last Saturday night, when the 29-year-old Denmark and former Spurs footballer Christian Eriksen ‘died’ for a few minutes on the pitch, was something few could have missed.

Thanks to prompt cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), administered by a team of medics, and the use of a defibrillator to shock his heart back to life, Christian (pictured inset) survived.

This brought back powerful memories of the last time I had to do CPR, exactly 15 years ago, and even now I get the shivers thinking about what might have happened if I hadn’t known what to do.

I was in the offices of a TV production company, discussing a new series, when I heard a lot of noise coming from the corridor, followed by someone banging on the door. One of the production staff, a young woman called Sophie Arthur, had suddenly keeled over and hit the floor mid-conversation.

When I got there someone had put Sophie in the recovery position and called 999, but they didn’t know what else to do. Sophie didn’t respond when I called her name, so I checked to see if she was breathing — you do this by looking to see if their chest is moving and, if it’s not, you put your ear to their nose or mouth to see if you can feel or hear anything. In Sophie’s case there was nothing.

I’d done CPR before, but in a hospital setting, with lots of back up, so this was much scarier. I began thinking, ‘A, B, C’. Airway, breathing, circulation — the mnemonic used to guide your steps.

HER airways weren’t blocked, but she wasn’t breathing and when I checked for her pulse there was not even a flicker. So I knew her heart was no longer pumping blood around her body. Without immediate help she was going to die, probably within the next few minutes.

Fortunately, I was joined by Dr Claire Tocher, a colleague working in the building. While someone went to find an automatic defibrillator, Claire and I began doing CPR.

These days the advice is that, unless you are trained, to forget about doing mouth-to-mouth and stick to doing chest compressions. This drives oxygen in the person’s lungs around their body, keeping the brain alive, at least for a while.

Claire and I were both trained in CPR so we began a more complicated regimen of 30 chest compressions to two rescue breaths. And we kept this up for 25 minutes while we waited for the paramedics to arrive with a defibrillator as there wasn’t one in the building.

The paramedics shocked Sophie’s heart back into rhythm before rushing her to hospital. I’m told her heart stopped twice in the ambulance, and both times she was shocked back to life.

Claire and I were thrilled that we’d managed to keep Sophie alive, but this was no time to celebrate. We didn’t know if she’d survive and, if she did, would she be left permanently brain damaged because of a lack of oxygen? And why had she collapsed in the first place? In a young person such as Sophie (then in her 20s) or Christian Eriksen, this kind of collapse is rare, but not that rare.

It’s often because the heart suddenly develops a lifethreatening abnormal rhythm.

Every year in the UK, more than 600 people under the age of 35 die from sudden cardiac arrest — one of the biggest killers of young people after road traffic accidents and suicide. The good news is that Sophie made a full recovery, though the cause was never identified.

As a precaution she was fitted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), a small device that’s placed under the skin, usually below the collar bone, which monitors the heart and can automatically shock it back to life should anything abnormal happen again. Which, I’m delighted to say, it hasn’t. Christian Eriksen is reported to be getting an ICD.

Sophie since married and is the proud mother of two lovely children — she’s still working in TV. Soon after she recovered she sent me a small tree, a symbol of how precious life is, which I planted in our garden. Looking at it reminds me how differently things would have turned out if Claire and I hadn’t been trained in CPR.

Every year more than 30,000 people in the UK have a cardiac arrest outside a hospital setting, and less than one in ten survives — every minute someone lies there untreated reduces their chance of survival by 10 per cent. Yet a recent survey found that a third of Brits wouldn’t know what to do. After calling 999, the NHS says:

PLACE the heel of your hand on the breastbone at the centre of the person’s chest. Place your other hand on top of your first hand and interlock your fingers.

USINg your body weight, press straight down 5 to 6cm (2 to 2.5in) on their chest. Release to allow the chest to return to its original position. Then repeat compressions at a rate of 100 to 120 times a minute — think of the beat of the song Staying Alive by the Bee gees.

Perhaps even better is learning to do it on a dummy: visit St John Ambulance (sja.org.uk) for more information and courses.