An Offaly camogie player who had a cardiac arrest was able to return to training just one month later. 

Aisling Brennan woke up on 29th December last year expecting her day to be completely normal. 

She had planned to go on a hike and went over to her friend’s house beforehand to meet up. 

 “I had no symptoms,” Ms Brennan explained on Moncrieff. 

“I was feeling fine, I had obviously planned to go for a walk that morning, when I suddenly collapsed.” 

At the time, she was not even aware she collapsed and it was not until New Year’s Eve that she regained full consciousness. 

“There was no trigger for me,” she added. 

“There was nothing that kind of precipitated it for me.”

Fortunately, her friends “jumped into action straight away”. 

“They started CPR immediately and were able to do two person CPR,” she said. 

“They immediately rang emergency services, had an ambulance on the way like that. 

“They just didn't panic.” 

Two ambulances arrived and it was quickly arranged that Ms Brennan would be airlifted to hospital in Limerick, which took only 15 minutes. 

Once there, she was placed in an induced coma and awoke just hours before the New Year. 

“I had actually been training for a marathon that I was planning to do,” she said. 

“It's only in a couple of weeks in Rome - so, I would have probably felt the fittest I'd ever felt going into, you know, the end of December.” 

It has left her medical team extremely puzzled as to why a healthy young woman had such a serious medical episode. 

“They still don't know what the cause was,” she said. 

“Even following up with my cardiologist a couple of weeks ago, he still doesn't know why this happened. 

“And I'm still going for for kind of ongoing investigations.”

She worried it would mean the end of her time playing competitive sport, something that has always been an important part of her life. 

However, doctors have inserted an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) inside her. 

“It's basically like a little kind of battery powered device and it's inserted right beside my rib cage with a trace somewhere into my heart,” she explained. 

“What it does is it just tracks and monitors my heart rate, so if something like this was to happen again, if I was to have an abnormal heart rhythm, it would just deliver a small shock if it needed to.”

Main image: Aisling Brennan. Image: Supplied.