Profile

I live in Cambridge. I moved here to do my cardiac science training programme. I live in a shared house with 6 other young professionals. I love to travel, and spent 4 months travelling by myself in South America before starting my training. I love food and eating out with my friends and family. I also love to run (although I didn’t when I was younger!) and have run 5 marathons and a 45 mile ultra marathon. One day I hope to be able to run the London marathon and also qualify for the Boston marathon. I’d also like to do a more ‘crazy marathon’ like the Great Wall marathon in china, or the Antarctic Ice marathon in Chile.

I work in a cardiac hospital near Cambridge called Royal Papworth. My work is quite varied and ranges from programming pacemakers to performing ultrasound scans of the heart, to monitoring a patients heart rhythm and blood pressure during procedures to open up blocked arteries in the heart after a heart attack.

One place where I work is called the ‘Cath Lab’ or ‘Catheter Laboratory’. It is called this because most of the operations that happen here are done using long thin tubes called catheters, which are passed through a tiny hole in the patients wrist, instead of a big operation where the patient is opened up. This means the recovery time for patients is much faster.

Operations that happen in the Cath Lab include putting in pacemakers, and catheter procedures called angioplasty, which uses catheters with balloons on the end to open up a patients blocked arteries before a small metal cage called a stent is put in to hold the artery open.

For a pacemaker implant, it is my job to choose which kind of pacemaker for the doctor to put in, to test the pacemaker leads that the doctor has put in to check that they are in a good position and to programme the best pacemaker settings for each patient.

During angioplasty, I montor the patients heart rhythm and blood pressure  patterns, and let the doctor know if I notice any changes, as the changes may mean that the doctor needs to stop what they are doing, or change the position of the catheters, or that the patient’s condition is getting worse. The doctors are so focused on doing the operation, they can’t watch everything, so it’s really important that we work as a team!

My typical day may involve seeing patients in clinic and looking at their pacemaker programming, testing pacemakers that are being implanted for the first time, or assisting in procedures with patients who have had a heart attack, but each patient is different, and you never know quite how your day is going to go!

If I won the money, i’d like to make a circuit with a pacemaker and some light bulbs, which would sit inside a wooden model of a heart, with the pacemaker as the battery. Then, when the pacemaker would normally try to send an electrical signal to the heart, the correct lightbulbs would light up. If you programmed the pacemaker to increase the heart rate, the lightbulbs would flash faster. It would make it much easier to show how a pacemaker worked!