Heart Monitors                                    Oct 2007

When Pauline Worboys, wife of the then Vice-President of Ashbourne & District Lions, Peter Worboys, collapsed with no prior warning three times within two hours and was rushed by ambulance to Derbyshire Royal Infirmary, various tests carried out revealed no obvious cause, and in fact she did not collapse again while in hospital. As her discharge from hospital the next day was being arranged, one of the doctors remarked that he would have liked to send her home with a 24 hour heart monitor attached, but DRI had insufficient such monitors available. However, as it happened, one did become available at the last moment. The following morning, while wearing the monitor, she again collapsed twice and was re-admitted by ambulance to DRI where the monitor was read. It revealed that Pauline's heart had stopped on all five occasions, and quite fortuitously restarted itself within about half a minute. She therefore immediately had a pacemaker fitted to stimulate her heart whenever it falters, and she now leads a perfectly normal life. Upon hearing of the shortage of monitors at DRI and how life saving they can be, Ashbourne Lions resolved to organise various events in order to raise funds to buy an additional monitor for DRI. In fact their fund raising efforts proved so successful that the Lions were able to afford a 48 hour monitor with an in-built feature automatically highlighting moments of irregular heartbeat, speeding up the diagnostic stage. Pauline and her husband together with current Lion President Tom Donnelly and with some other Lions recently visited DRI to present the monitor to Katie Joy of the Clinical Measurement Department.