2020-02-29 New Zealand Listener

LISTENER FEBRUARY 29 2020

“When I got there, he was presenting

like someone who had been knocked

out,” Barron told the New Zealand Wom-

an’s Weekly. “He just took a couple of very

laboured breaths and made one very long

outward breath and that was the last one

he took on his own. My hand was already

on his neck, and there was no pulse. That

was a very odd feeling.”

Cardiac arrests are often wrongly referred

to as heart attacks, in which the heart usu-

ally does not stop but a clot forms in a

coronary artery, blocking the blood vessel

and causing the death of heart muscle in

the area it supplies. Although both men

had arrests, the causes were different. May’s

was the result of an undiagnosed congenital

condition, hypertrophic obstructive cardio-

myopathy, a medical mouthful that means

the heart muscle has become abnormally

thick, disturbing its electrical signals. Page’s

arrest came a day after his 48th birthday.

Rob Doughty, the Heart Foundation

chair of heart health at the University

of Auckland, says cardiac arrests caused

by congenital conditions rather than

acquired cardiovascular disease become

less common as people age – they often

happen in children or young adults – but

it’s not unusual for the first symptom of

the disease to be a sudden death or a very

close call. May has since had a defibrillator

implanted in his chest, an operation that

Doughty says is not uncommon and

similar to the insertion of a pacemaker.

But there are efforts to get more

defibrillators, known as AEDs (automated

external defibrillators) in work and public

places to be used in emergencies. Auckland

paramedic and resuscitation tutor Gareth

Jenkin runs a website, aedlocations.co.nz,

and an app that lists the locations of about

11,000 publicly available defibrillators. It

was launched after a Listener story about

heart attacks and defibrillators in 2010,

when Jenkin says only about 700 devices

were in a database he’d compiled. The story

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HEART DISEASE TREATMENT

“My hand was already

on his neck, and there

was no pulse. That was

a very odd feeling.”

Professors Rob

Doughty, left, and

John Ormiston.

Lucky day: Ricky May, left,

suffered a cardiac arrest

at a race meeting, but was

revived by fellow harness

driver Ellie Barron, right.