8-months pregnant woman heard husband collapse in bathroom and broke open the door. One look, and she knew what to do
Seeing a loved one face a medical emergency can be pretty stressful and scary. It was especially hard for one woman, Krystalla Panayi-Davidson, who was 35 weeks pregnant when her husband suffered from a cardiac arrest. It was the first day of the woman's maternity leave back in 2021 and everything was going fine. The couple had gone to bed for the day when Krystalla heard a sound from the bathroom. She went to check and saw her husband, Lee, collapsed on the floor. Her next action helped save his life, per the British Heart Foundation.
"I was 35 weeks pregnant, so quite heavily pregnant," Krystalla recounted. "The day it happened, I just started my maternity leave. On Saturday morning, we'd both gone to the garden centre to get some more pond plants. It was our little project before the baby came and the veg patch." The couple had friends over and were playing a murder mystery game with them. They were excited to spend time with their friends, as it might get a little challenging to do so after they had the baby. Krystalla and Lee had gone to bed and that's when everything "changed." Krystalla heard a strange noise from the bathroom and rushed to check, as Lee hadn't come back from the bathroom.
"I was woken by an almighty crash. I thought it was Lee knocking over a plant in the bathroom. But our dog ran upstairs and something made me get up and check if Lee was OK," Krystalla explained. She knocked down the bathroom door and found her husband lying on the floor. "Lee's feet were up against the bathroom door and he was lying against the shower in a really contorted position. I knew immediately something was really wrong." She added, "I managed to roll Lee over as he was on his side with his head wedged under the bath. God knows how I managed that as I was eight months pregnant, but adrenaline just kicked in."
Krystalla could see that her husband was struggling to breathe. "I bolted downstairs to get my phone, ran back to Lee and rang 999. By that time, he was not breathing, so in that moment, I just went into autopilot and knew I needed to start CPR immediately." She knew how to administer CPR as a primary school teacher and had been trained for it multiple times. "The emergency call handler talked me through CPR. She told me I needed to keep going and she'd let me know when the paramedics arrived at the house so I could run down and let them in." The paramedics arrived and Krystalla rushed to let them in. She took them upstairs with her and the team took over the CPR.
They used a defibrillator and shocked the man three times before he started breathing again. Lee was taken to the hospital and put in a medically induced coma. The doctors could wake the man up after three days. "We'd already decided to call our daughter Martha and the first thing he said to me after waking up was, 'Where's Martha?' He did not remember that she had not been born yet." A few weeks later, Martha was born and the mom was grateful to see her husband and daughter together after the harrowing incident. "I take so many photos of Martha and Lee together, because this is something I might never have seen. It's the little moments that make me emotional, like seeing Lee read or sing to Martha."