On New Year's Eve of 2019 Sandra McCartney was clinically dead for 10 minutes. She was 59 when she collapsed during a Christmas holiday in Spain, lost consciousness, stopped breathing and had no pulse or heartbeat after suffering a cardiac arrest. Sandra's life was saved when medics managed to restore a normal heart rhythm during a frantic race against time when paramedics gave her "six defibrillator shocks and five shots of adrenaline to save my life".
Her life may have been turned upside down in that moment but she believes she had been living with a ticking time bomb long before that. Sandra found out that the heart attack and cardiac arrest were triggered by a life-threatening genetic condition called "familial hypercholesterolaemia" (FH). It causes high cholesterol and, if untreated, can lead to early heart attacks and heart disease.
The mother-of-four, from Londonderry, did not even know she had it. The British Heart Foundation estimates that more than quarter of a million people in the UK have the condition, but more than two-thirds of people who have FH are never diagnosed. However, Northern Ireland has the highest detection rate in the UK.
The experience is something that has left its mark on Sandra. "I had three cracked ribs from the CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) and I was gone for 10 minutes before they got me back, which is terrifying to think about." On the night she took ill, Sandra thought she had indigestion because of her "hiatus hernia" - a condition common in the over-50s, where part of the stomach moves up towards the stomach. She alerted her husband when she began to feel an acute pain followed by a tingling sensation in her right arm.
As he tried to check if the local health centre was open in the middle of the night Sandra's pain left her and she started "drifting off". "I was just falling into a deep sleep and he woke me, roaring at me, and shook me," she said. She was told by a doctor she was having a major heart attack.
Familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) is quite a common genetic condition, affecting about 1 in every 250-500 people in the population, but many people do not know they have it. If one parent has FH, there is a 50% chance their child could have it, too. FH can be very dangerous if left untreated, as it can lead to very high cholesterol, raising the risk of heart attacks or strokes.
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