Marita Hook was in what turned out to be the right place at a very wrong time.
Sitting in a Cheltenham pub surrounded by friends, the 61-year-old was mid-sentence as she talked about her recent trip to Crete when her heart suddenly stopped, and she slumped unconscious in front of her horrified audience.
But, like an increasing number of Victorians, Hook was saved because her friends jumped into action.
“If it wasn’t for all these guys, I wouldn’t be here today,” an emotional Hook said, while reuniting with her friends and paramedics this week.
“I often stop and think, ‘I’m alive’, and until you’ve been through something like this I don’t think you can realise what it’s like to feel like that.
“If it was 30 minutes earlier, and I wasn’t there with my friends, I wouldn’t be sitting here today. But they did an amazing job and everyone stepped up so quickly and went into save-me mode, which was quite amazing.”
Hook’s mate of 35 years, Glenn Miles, began CPR on the floor of the pub within moments of her collapsing in cardiac arrest on October 6. He was guided initially by his first-aid-trained wife, Sue, and then by a Triple Zero operator. Those initial compressions made all the difference.
Another friend then retrieved the hotel’s defibrillator and the barmen helped connect its pads to Hook’s chest. The machine offered further instruction for the CPR effort, and twice shocked Hook’s heart back into action before MICA paramedics arrived to continue the life-saving effort.
Hook recovered in the Victorian Heart Hospital for a week, becoming part of two encouraging statistics: a record 152 Victorians to receive a shock from publicly accessible automated external defibrillators (AED) in 2024-25 when they needed help, and a surge in people who survived to leave hospital as a result.
The state is now second in the world to Denmark in terms of survival when cardiac arrest is witnessed.
The latest results, released by the Victorian Ambulance Cardiac Arrest Registry on Tuesday, reveal a record 63 per cent of people who were administered a defibrillator shock from a bystander last year survived to be discharged from hospital, compared with just 35 per cent of those who had to wait for a paramedic or a firefighter to arrive.
The bystander-shock survival rate has surged from just 47 per cent the previous year and Ambulance Victoria director of research and evaluation Dr Ziad Nehme said the results were incredible, though he is desperate to see more people saved.
“Only a quarter of all patients who could be shocked are being shocked by members of the community, and we’d love to see, over the next decade, those numbers double,” Nehme said.
“If you can get early defibrillation, certainly in the first few minutes after a person collapses, you can literally change someone’s life.
“The sad truth about this condition is that it’s going to be your spouse or a member of your family, someone that you love, with 77 per cent of these cases occurring in the home.”
There are now more than 10,819 active and registered AEDs in Victoria, including 8243 that are publicly accessible.
Their increased use and effectiveness is part of an overall increase in the success of bystander first aid. Two years ago, 36 per cent of Victorians who suffered cardiac arrest in front of a witness survived but, with a greater focus on encouraging bystanders to step up, that figure jumped to 44.4 per cent in the latest data.
For Miles, his wife, Sue, and their friends, the success is being well celebrated.
“Sue and I still sit in wonder at how well Marita’s recovered because, basically, she carked it on us,” he said. “Then, with a week, we realised she was going to be fine, within a month she was no problem, and we were back at the hotel within two months.”
For Hook, returning to the pub was only the first step in enjoying the life she almost lost, and she is now planning her next overseas jaunt.
“They gave us a free meal,” she laughed. “It was a little bit confronting, but it was nice to be back – I’m alive, and there is no turning back.”