'My husband wouldn't be here without CPR training'

The wife of a former non-league footballer has said she would now be living "a very different life" if she had not had the training to save him when she woke up in the middle of the night to find him "gargling" in the midst of a cardiac arrest.

Kat Dodd, 31, performed 16 minutes of CPR on Adam Dodd, 32, after she woke to find him in distress on 4 June 2022.

"Without [the] training Adam wouldn't be here... it was really important and lucky that I knew what I was doing," Ms Dodd told BBC Radio Manchester.

The couple have now teamed up with the British Heart Foundation to encourage others to become CPR trained.

Mrs Dodd said it had been "just a normal day" and the couple had eaten a takeaway and gone to bed.

She said she was awoken in the early hours by a noise coming from the ex-FC United of Manchester player.

"When I turned to look at him, I noticed that he'd completely gone black," she said.

"He had no blood running through his body any more.

"And the sound he was making, it was like almost like a gargle.

"They call it agonal breathing, which is your body's last gasps."

Ms Dodd said she called an ambulance immediately and began cardiopulmonary resuscitation, performing it for 16 minutes until the vehicle arrived.

"It was awful because obviously I was just screaming out loud 'you can't die... you can't leave me'," she said.

"But also, I was trying to perform CPR to the best of my ability, trying to save his life.

"It was a long 16 minutes."

Mr Dodd woke up in hospital days later after being in an induced coma in intensive care.

More than two years on, he is back playing football for Bamber Bridge and now lives with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), which protects him from life-threatening heart rhythms.

Mrs Dodd said she was "one of the lucky ones", because she had been first aid-trained in her job as a primary school teacher.

"I never ever thought I'd have to use it, especially not on my husband," she said.

"Performing CPR gives people the best chance for when the medical professionals do get there, and that is why we're really really proud to be part of this campaign to promote people to learn CPR."

According to The British Heart Foundation, more than 40,000 people a year have an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the UK, and fewer than 10% survive.

However, giving CPR promptly and using a defibrillator can more than double someone's chance of survival.

The couple are now encouraging others to become first aid-trained - and raising awareness of The British Heart Foundation's free, interactive, online CPR training course, RevivR.

Completing the course takes 15 minutes, and promises to teach participants how to recognise and react to a cardiac arrest.

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