Saved twice - by CPR and cutting-edge technology

"Bethany Mansbridge's life has been saved twice in the past few months, by old-fashioned CPR from an off-duty doctor, and then by cutting-edge technology. In early October, the 14-year-old from Merrijig was at pony club, and her horse was being 'a bit silly' lining up for a jump. 'The next moment I couldn't see properly, everything went kind of fuzzy,' Bethany said. 'I woke up just before I was put in the ambulance.' She had suddenly, inexplicably gone into full cardiac arrest. For almost 15 minutes before the ambulance arrived she was kept alive by a doctor and nurse and parents of other children in the competition, who leapt from the crowd and performed CPR. But once she was at Royal Children's Hospital, doctors were perplexed by the cause of the arrest. 'It was very frustrating for them,' said Bethany's mother, Heather. 'It was a full-on cardiac arrest and usually there's a pretty good reason for that.' For weeks, every test the medical team could think of found that Bethany had a perfectly healthy heart. They concluded it must have been a fault in the electrical "wiring" of her heart, and decided to treat her on that basis. However, while at Monash Medical Centre, preparing for an operation, Bethany was put through a powerful new scanner that was unveiled days after her cardiac arrest. The $3.5 million CT scanner, the most advanced in the southern hemisphere, provides an incredibly detailed 3D model of the living heart. It helped doctors finally spot the cause of the problem. A tiny part of Bethany's aortic valve, which controls blood flow out of the heart, was "tethered" across her coronary artery, which sends blood to the heart muscle to keep it pumping. The artery had been 80 per cent blocked her whole life — a ticking time bomb that was set to go off at moments of extreme physical or emotional stress. 'She could have died,' said Dr Sujith Seneviratne, co-director of the CT scanner unit. 'She is an outdoors-loving person — this could have happened somewhere with no support.' With the problem identified, Bethany has had heart surgery at the RCH to correct it. Tests next year will determine its success, but her doctors hope she can get back on the horse and try that jump that defeated her, before the end of 2009" - The Age