A Southport man who had a heart attack while getting ready for work says he wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for his bathtub.
On December 17, 1992 Fred McCann, 78, was in the shower when he suffered from a heart attack and collapsed.
But his life was saved after he fell at the ‘perfect angle’, which meant his chest hit the bath, a move that he says ‘kickstarted’ his heart and saved his life.
‘The consultant told me that [if I had landed on the bath] a bit higher or lower it wouldn’t have worked’, he told Liverpool Echo.
32 years after his near-death-experience, Fred says he celebrates a second birthday, or a ‘re-birthday’ every year on December 17 to commemorate the day his bath saved his life.
‘If the King can have two birthdays, it seems only right that I should,’ he said.
Fred suffered from his heart attack just weeks after he started experiencing chest pains.
Although he was first told he had a hernia, Fred found himself collapsed on the bathroom floor.
On December 17, 1992, Fred McCann, 78, was in the shower when he suffered from a heart attack and collapsed. But he says his bathtub saved his life
Fred says he fell at the ‘perfect angle’, which meant his chest hit the bath – a move that he says ‘kickstarted’ his heart and saved his life
He was able to dial 999 and was rushed to hospital, where a doctor saw the massive bruise on his chest and told him the fall had saved his life.
Fred’s story comes as a major study recently revealed that people who get sick with Covid are at a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Using data from over 200,000 people from the United Kingdom with an average age of 67 who caught Covid in 2020, researchers found the more sick someone was, the more likely they were to develop heart problems.
Overall, being infected with Covid doubled someone’s risk of a heart attack or stroke at least three years after the initial infection.
And patients who were hospitalized because of the virus were four times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than those who didn’t get it.
This new research comes as other doctors search for clues as to why fatal heart attacks in people under 45 have been increasing. Some point to the the Covid virus as a cause.
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