Woman who had just 90 days until her heart stopped beating gets life saving operation

Pamela MacPherson's operation to change her pacemaker had been cancelled several times and was close to the end of its life but within hours of her telling her story she received her surgery

A WOMAN who had less than 90 days before her heart stopped beating has undergone surgery for a new pacemaker.

Last night Pamela MacPherson, 48, thanked the Daily Record for advocating on her behalf to speed up her surgery.

On Friday the Daily Record told how Pamela MacPherson’s heart pacemaker was perilously close to shutting down.

She feared she would collapse if it stopped working - and not without reason because before she had a pacemaker installed as a baby her heart had stopped 42 times.

We told how three scheduled operations to replace the pacemaker were cancelled at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Another two for the Golden Jubilee hospital in Clydebank were also called off.

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Scottish Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton called for her to get her op urgently.

He said: “If I was an NHS health boss, I’d be crawling over broken glass to get this woman seen immediately.”

And the Golden Jubilee Hospital responded rapidly when we raised it with them on Thursday, carrying out the operation just hours after the story appeared in the paper.

As she lay in recovery, Pamela, who lives on the south side of Glasgow said: “I am now back up in the ward.

“Thank you so much for all your help and support, the article was amazing.”

When she leaves hospital her parents will care for her for around two weeks before she is able to move the upper half of her body properly and return to work as a childminder.

Miracle baby Pamela, 48, first appeared in the Daily Record in 1976 as she prepared to leave hospital to celebrate her first birthday at home.

But having a pacemaker has enabled her to live a normal life since then.At one stage, her parents Jim and Avril were told she was unlikely to last two hours.

Her pacemaker was changed at Yorkhill sick children’s hospital when she was a child and then as an adult she was referred to Glasgow Royal Infirmary before she began to attend Scotland’s national hospital, the Golden Jubilee in Clydebank.

operations.

But this year the normal pattern changed.

Pamela's pacemaker has been changed around 10 times throughout her life without any problem.

But a succession of cancellations meant she was in danger of it stopping working.

Pamela, from Glasgow’s southside, said: “My pacemaker was due to be changed in August last year so I went into get an ECG at the Royal and they said it would be changed in there. For all these years it was the Golden Jubilee but I was happy to go wherever I needed to go.

And she added: " I got an appointment first for August but it was cancelled a couple of days before and then I got a second appointment in September and it was cancelled as well. It was rescheduled for the Royal at the end of September and I actually got to go in that day and expected to have the surgery but the guy there said to me he couldn’t change it because it was in too deep and he would have to refer me to the Golden Jubilee.

“At that point I wrote a letter of complaint but I only got a half-hearted apology back.”

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