My husband died at the end of April of a cardiac arrest and aspiration pneumonia which resulted after CPR. I just can’t stop myself reliving his final few days and torturing myself with regrets that I didn’t realise that his heart was failing. If various decisions had been made that week he would probably still be here today. A piece of medical advice was wrong, we didn’t go to A&E when we had had the chance and I had no idea that his heart was in such a bad condition. I know it’s very destructive to keep saying “if only…” but I can’t stop myself!
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Hi Minky,
My partner had a cardiac arrest due to heart failure.
I researched that heart failure occurs over a long period of time, years in fact and that there are no symptoms. My partner had no symptoms at all until the week before his cardiac arrest, when he slept a lot but we put this down to other things. I was also told theirs nothing anyone could have done, he was doing everything he should have, eating healthily, had lost a lot of weight over the previous year, did the gym 3x a week and rode his bike for many miles every week. It still got him. I was told it’s very rare to recover from a cardiac arrest. However, if he’d had a heart attack it could have been different.
Please don’t blame yourself, there’s nothing you could have done. I’m sure if it.
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@Ali29 Thank you Ali. I really appreciate your empathetic and supportive words and I know that it will take me a long time to come to terms with what happened to my husband.
You have suffered a very similar loss to myself and have obviously done much research on cardiac arrest. I sometimes wonder if it would have been better for my husband not to have been resuscitated as we were all given hope (including him) which was then snatched away again. Then again that CPR gave him back to us for a final weekend so we wouldn’t want to have missed that either. It was just such a rollercoaster of emotions with the saddest of outcomes.
I hope that you’re doing ok Ali as you are so kind and helpful to everyone else. x
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@Minky67 @Ali29 my lovely husband Pete went out on his bike on 2nd April and suffered a cardiac arrest, he was resuscitated but never regained consciousness and on 8th April they turned the machines off. He wanted to donate his organs and saved 4 people’s lives. I too feel what if? He was slim and fit, only 67. He had had high blood pressure which they just kept giving him different medication for. So many of our friends had high blood pressure we didn’t really worry about it. But it was obviously because of his artery blocking. It was a Sunday morning he went cycling and i find Sundays really hard. For those 6 days he was in an induced coma we had hope, but now i know only a small percentage survive a cardiac arrest. But my children and i got to sit with him and hold his hand and tell him how much we lived him. I will never understand why he was taken but each day i am trying to make plans and keep busy but i miss him so much. Sending love to everyone in this horrible grief.
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I get the hating Sundays, as my partner also died on a sunday morning. sundays will never be the same.