Heart help

“I played in goal for the last ten minutes and felt a bit tired,” he recalled.

He felt a few painful chest twinges, but shrugged it off as muscular pain.

Walking back to the office, he got as far as High Row before suddenly feeling so ill he had to sit down.

He said: “That is when I made the most sensible move of life and went back to the Dolphin Centre.”

He told reception staff that he had chest pains and pins and needles down both arms.

“The duty manager told me to sit down, gave me oxygen and called an ambulance.”

The paramedics appeared almost immediately.

“They cut my top and socks off, kept me talking, gave a spray and what looked like a giant aspirin.”

Mr Brough believes he then passed out.

“That is when they used the defibrillator on me,” he says. Although staff were ready to use the centre’s own defibrillator, paramedics arrived so quickly that they used their own.

Mr Brough woke in an ambulance taking him to The James Cook University Hospital, in Middlesbrough.

Fully conscious at this stage, it was explained to him that he would undergo an angiogram, where a tiny tube is inserted into his vascular system via his wrist and dye is pumped up to the heart, showing up any blockages.

He said: “They found there was a partial blockage to one of my coronary arteries.”

A cardiologist then inserted a tiny balloon into the tube and moved it up to the blockage.

A small reinforced tube, known as a stent, was put in place to ensure blood flow to the heart was unobstructed.

Three months since his heart attack, Mr Brough has made a good recovery. Because he was treated with a defibrillator so quickly, his heart was not seriously damaged.

He said: “My confidence was really boosted after I joined a cardiac rehabilitation group run by Dr Barbara Conway. My goal is to play fivea- side again, and I was recently told by a car- diologist that there is now nothing to stop me.”

However, he is keen to find a gym that has a defibrillator.

He said: “I have been told I need to do moderate exercise three times a week, but I would like to go somewhere where they have the right facilities in case I have a problem.

“What worries me is how many others like me are going to gyms where they do not have defibrillators. They might not be as lucky as I was if they had a heart attack.”

THERE is a personal link between the Echo’s campaign and the original Chance To Live campaign to cut heart surgery queues in 1999. Mr Brough used to work at The Northern Echo. One of his colleagues was photographer Ian Weir.

Mr Weir, a father of two boys, collapsed at his home in Darlington the day before he was due to see a specialist to discover when the bypass operation he needed was to be carried out.

Mr Weir, a friend of then-Health Secretary Alan Milburn, died in 1999 after waiting nearly eight months for a triple heart bypass.

In response, The Northern Echo launched A Chance To Live, pledging to put pressure on the Labour Government to cut the 18-month waiting list for bypass surgery in the UK in line with waiting times in places such as the Netherlands, where no one waited longer than three months.

Mr Milburn, the former Darlington MP, responded by securing investment to expand the capacity at NHS heart units, including The James Cook University Hospital and the Freeman Hospital, in Newcastle.

Catheter laboratories were also opened at smaller hospitals such as Darlington Memorial Hospital to speed the diagnosis of heart problems.

In 2007, the Government target of reducing deaths from coronary care disease for people aged under 75 by 40 per cent had been met five years early, saving more than 22,000 lives a year.

Professor Jerry Murphy, a consultant cardiologist at Darlington Memorial Hospital, believes too many people die unnecessarily when their lives could have been saved by defibrillators.

He said: “There is no point in improving the acute end of the service for heart patients without improving the rest of the services. We try to encourage preventative measures and we are better at identifying people who might be prone to a heart attack.”

However, he wants to see more defibrillators in places where people exercise and play sport.

Automatic defibrillators analyse whether someone requires an electrical shock to the heart and deliver exactly the right charge.

All the operator has to do is place the attached pads on the patient’s chest and press a button.

Defibrillators at the Dolphin Centre and at the Eastbourne Sports Complex, in Darlington, have been used a total of about four or five times in the past five years.

Nick Wallis, Darlington Borough Council’s cabinet member for leisure, said: “Defibrillators are an essential and potentially life-saving piece of equipment. Just one life saved makes them worthwhile.”