A woman has been reunited with the emergency responder who collapsed from a heart attack in her living room - while treating her for a cardiac arrest. Daisy Devane, 31, collapsed on the sofa at home and her husband, Eammon, 33, performed CPR before the ambulance crews turned up. One of those responders was senior emergency medical technician Jeremy Williams, 55, who was timing the chest compressions when he felt an instant pain in his chest. The medical team split in two - half working on Daisy and the other half trying to save their colleague. He was whisked away and taken to Lister Hospital, Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and treated for a heart attack, while Daisy was taken to Bedford Hospital, Bedfordshire. Although Daisy doesn't remember the incident, as she lost three weeks' worth of memory, she is so "grateful" to Jeremy and the other responders. She was reunited with him over a year on and says she wished she had done it sooner.
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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]