Cardiac arrest: Woman's heart restarted seven times in 11 days

A 22-year-old woman has said she is thankful to be alive after her heart needed to be restarted seven times.

Aoife Boyle was meeting friends for lunch in a Londonderry pub last month when she first collapsed.

Her friend, who is a nurse, put Aoife in the recovery position and performed CPR after she went into cardiac arrest.

The civil servant spent weeks in three hospitals, two in Northern Ireland and one in England, after suffering a total of seven cardiac arrests over 11 days.

The 22-year-old from Eglinton, County Londonderry, who has no family history of heart conditions, was told she may have caught a virus resulting in inflammation and excess fluid around her heart.

Aoife is now recovering at home, wearing a defibrillator vest and awaiting further tests.

Aoife's mum Tanya Boyle told BBC News NI she received the "every parent's worst nightmare" phone call.

"Aoife was meeting her friends for lunch at a pub, they just got in through the door, they didn't even make it to sit down, and the next thing she just collapsed and started taking seizures," she said.

"They rang me straight away, telling me to just get there quick."

Ms Boyle said she was forever thankful that one of Aoife's friends, Aideen McGuiness, was a trained nurse.

Ms McGuiness performed CPR on her friend until ambulance crews arrived

Aoife was taken to Altnagelvin Hospital where she had more cardiac arrests.

On one occasion, Ms Boyle said her sister and other family members were around Aoife's hospital bed video-calling her.

She had gone home to get some clothes to bring back to the hospital.

"I was on FaceTime to Aoife and I just saw the phone fall, and I heard squealing and shouting for nurses," she said.

Aoife was transferred to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast before later being airlifted to England and the specialist Freeman Hospital in Newcastle.

"Within 11 days she had seven cardiac arrests," Ms Boyle told BBC News NI.

"Five of them she stopped breathing and they had to do CPR, two of them they didn't have to do CPR but they had to sedate her to shock her to get the rhythm of her heart back.

"When we got to Newcastle, we were told her heart function was between 10 and 20%."

Aoife told BBC News NI she had little memory of collapsing at the pub or of the Derry and Belfast hospitals.

"It was only when I got to Newcastle and I started on different medications," she said. "I would have my good and bad days, but then reality slowly started to hit.

"I wouldn't have been an anxious person before but I got really anxious, I didn't let mummy out of my sight.

"The cardiac arrests would mostly happen when I was asleep at night so I was terrified to sleep."

Aoife said she was eternally grateful to her friend Aideen and the staff at all three hospitals.

"Any doctor that we seen said I was a very lucky girl to be living, and we just can't thank people enough," she said.

"I was leading a normal life, started a new job and was living like any other 22-year-old and then all of a sudden this happens.

"Life is far too short, that is the outlook you have to have when something like this happens."