Mercedes López Pardo, a nurse at the Reina Sofía University Hospital for two decades, had a cardiac arrest ten years ago while sleeping in her 50s. “My husband woke up and saw that it was stationary, which is very strange, thanks to the fact that there was worked in a workshop and that he had been taught cardiopulmonary resuscitation techniques in his company, he saved my life; He called 112 and they arrived immediately at 4:30 a.m. no traffic“, even though the people who saved me thought I wouldn’t say it.”
This nurse who had to leave her job after losing her heart rate twice stayed in intensive care for three or four days “thinking she wouldn’t get out… remove cables and other objectsand I got ahead. “I have a healthy heart but it stops, if it didn’t stop it would be healthy,” he wryly told ABC while commemorating Heart Day in the lobby from the Reina Sofía University Hospital.
In this case, it was not a heart attack, it was an arrhythmia that caused the arrest, recalls this retired nurse, “and I just wondered why this had happened to me if I didn’t had no history, nor if it was genetic… but once I did I went to see because they already told me that I had cholesterolhigh blood pressure, factors that I hadn’t given much thought to until then.
From that moment on, at the Cordoba hospital they installed a automatic defibrillator implantable device (ICD), a device he describes as “wonderful” and which gives him enormous peace of mind. Mercedes’ second heart attack came three years after the first. “At that point he didn’t put me to sleep but I was doing my business and I suddenly felt dizzy, like the light went out and I was falling flat but the machine gave me the spark and pulled me out. matter of secondsnot minutes, seconds; Therefore the difference between the first stop and what it took to recover from the whole process and the second was huge, they admitted me to check my vitals but I didn’t know about it. Now it’s my turn to change it.”
Since then, his life has changed a lot, he says, because he has had to stop working as a nurse but now helps other patients with cardiovascular pathologies as vice-president of the Association of Cardiac Patients of Cordoba.
“For me, the most important thing is the patient and it is the associations that give voice to this group of people, because the heart disease They are very widespread, so there are many of us, we have a fairly good quality of life, if we can rehabilitate if there is correct cardiac rehabilitation and what is the patient association It’s being the link between the patients and the hospital and we form a good team, and that gives us a lot of security. Cardiac patients need that security and we have it with those who care for us, with primary care professionals and the hospital, and this is a way to give their attention back.
Finally, the vice-president of Association of Cardiac Patients of Cordoba He explains that the best thing for heart patients “is to see other people who have overcome the disease and are living as normal and as good a life as possible, which doesn’t mean we can’t be happy and whatever they want. do like excursions. They come looking for information on how to get to this situation, how to adapt to a chronic illness and it must be a team between professionals and patients.
