Potholes are usually bad news, particularly for your car’s suspension and tyre, but for one pensioner those divots of doom turned out to be a lifesaver.
65-year-old Ray Lee was doing his usual exercise routine when he suffered what paramedics suspected was as a ventricular tachycardia attack, a sort of short circuit of the heart that typically causes a person’s heart rate to soar.
The grandfather-of-three experienced crippling chest pains and his heart rate rose to 186 beats per minute before an ambulance was called to whisk him away to Salisbury District Hospital.
After a dose of morphine to ease his pain, paramedics would normally have given Mr Lee an injection to stop his heart before restarting it upon reaching hospital. However, in a slightly strange turn of events, the ambulance drove over a particularly large pothole and the day was saved.
“We raced along the roads at high speed, with a medic standing in the back, leaning over me,” the retired teacher explained. “All of a sudden, there was a massive bang as we smacked into a pothole and the whole ambulance jolted. Everyone on board jumped and I was lifted off the stretcher, before falling back into place.”
After the pothole, Mr Lee’s ECG monitor then registered a significant drop in heart rate.”After a few seconds I readjusted myself, settled back down, and looked over at the monitor to see my heart rate had plummeted to 60bpm.”
“The paramedic looked at me in a state of disbelief, but nobody said anything because we were so focused on getting to hospital,” he added.
Even though Mr Lee felt like a ‘bit of a fraud’ upon arriving at hospital with his ticker back to normal, doctors monitored his condition for three days. It’s believed the trigger was potentially linked to a heart attack from 21 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, Mr Lee’s opinion of the problem of potholes in his home area of Wiltshire area has changed since the incident. “I’d been cursing the council for months about the state of the roads because I spend my life dodging potholes, but now I never want them to fill in another pothole again,” he said.
“I guess there are some potholes that ruin your car and others that save your life.”
Source: Daily Mail
Image: Flickr
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