When Polly the golden retriever’s bark woke Hannah Cooke in the middle of the night last year, she found her husband Adam breathing strangely next to her before he stopped breathing completely. Hannah, a 33 year old social services worker from Ballinamallard in County Fermanagh, performed CPR on Adam until an ambulance arrived. Paramedics shocked Adam with a defibrillator seven times on the journey from his home to hospital. He woke up six days later at age 37 after suffering a cardiac arrest in his sleep. Hannah and Adam are convinced their four year old dog helped save his life.
Polly will be honored as a CPR hero by the British Heart Foundation in London. Hannah said with a cardiac arrest everything happens in seconds and Polly gave her those seconds. She believes Polly knew before it was even happening and that Adam had just started the arrest as she barked. When Adam and Polly were reunited after weeks of recovery in hospital, he cried tears of joy. The dog was whimpering as if thinking he’d never come back home. Fearghal McKinney from the British Heart Foundation says in the UK there are 40,000 out of hospital cardiac arrests every year with fewer than one in ten surviving. For every minute that passes after cardiac arrest the chances of survival decrease by up to 10 percent. Dog behaviourist Louise Glazebrook explains that dogs have 220 million scent receptors compared to humans’ five million, allowing them to pick up signals we don’t understand and do incredible things in disease detection that can change the trajectory of a life forever.
