We have all heard the saying: “Cats have nine lives”. And we also all know it is just that, a saying. But what if we told you that a man has actually died nine times and lived to tell his story! Well, meet Jamie Poole, 29, who was born with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – a heart condition in which a portion of the heart becomes thickened, resulting in the organ being less able to pump blood effectively around the body, causing sometimes fatal complications.
The condition affects one in 500 in the UK, and as he says, it’s been causing him problems now for the last 10 years.
The condition makes him extremely susceptible to having heart attacks—the first of which he had at just 20-year-old. Since then, he has gone into cardiac arrest 9 times, having to be revived each time. Because of his condition, doctors put an instrument called an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) into his chest, that automatically shocks his heart back into action when he goes into cardiac arrest.