She says: 'I must have developed a deep-vein thrombosis and slowly my lungs were filling with clots, while my blood pressure was going through the roof.' David Jenkins is the consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at Papworth Hospital who carried out Vonetta's surgery. Gradually, Vonetta's arteries were filling with multiple blood clots, which she later discovered had migrated from her legs, having been brought on by both the pressure of the immobility during her long flights to Jamaica - and the 'sticky' blood caused by her birth-control pill, microgynon.' Organic: Radio favourite Bob in his award-winning Norfolk garden The life was draining out of me and I was so weak I could barely lift my head from the pillow.' She adds: 'As a mother, it was awful not to be able to look after my own children. I could not get my breath and I was so weak I could barely stand up.' 'At the hospital, I was given every kind of test - for AIDS, malaria, TB - and the doctors seemed completely baffled. She says: 'I took to bed and poor Bob had to do everything about the house - taking the children to school, cooking and washing my clothes. Then, while trying to take part in a first-aid course with a friend, she collapsed as she tried to give someone the kiss of life. Doctors found a shadow on her lungs, but she was told it was the pleurisy returning. But nothing helped.'Īfter six weeks, Vonetta asked for an X-ray at her local hospital. I saw the doctor at home numerous times, and was prescribed endless courses of antibiotics. 'I'd always been so healthy, I could not believe that I was really ill. 'By now, I was really short of breath and I had short, stabbing pains down my left-hand side. The couple, who have been married for ten years, flew home to Norfolk the following February. But I was so ill, I asked Bob to fly out too, to help me with them.' I had taken the children with me and was intending to stay several months. He said that was quite normal after a long flight, and I should feel fine after a course of antibiotics.'īut the breathlessness would not go away. ![]() He took me to see his private doctor and he diagnosed pleurisy - fluid on the lungs. 'After I arrived in Jamaica this time, I began to feel very breathless when I was working with my father in the garden. She says: ' I often fly to Jamaica to see my parents, and I had been concerned that on previous flights my legs had seemed to swell up. Vonetta had been perfectly healthy until November 2008. Vonetta offered to plait Bob's hair - he still wears it in a distinctive long plait - and the couple fell in love immediately. 'I spotted her immediately,' Bob says as he recalls their first meeting. ![]() He met Vonetta, who is Jamaican, when he was visiting her father's garden on the Caribbean island during one of one his many trips to find rare plants. Vonetta, 30, lives with 55-year-old Bob in their idyllic countryside home in Dickleburgh in Norfolk, where Bob tends his award winning organic garden.īob is one of the foremost organic gardeners in the country, as well as appearing on numerous gardening programmes on television and radio. 'I was a very spiritual person anyway, but since the operation I have become even more convinced that we are put on this Earth for a purpose, and that it was simply not my time to die.' ![]() 'It's a very strange idea to think that your body has, effectively, been a corpse,' Vonetta says. The surgery, which can take up to 11 hours to complete, is one of the most complex and difficult heart-and-lung operations being undertaken in the world today, and involves cooling the body down to 20C - way below the measure for normal hypothermic death - and draining the entire body of blood. Growing stronger every day: Vonetta suffered from a rare form of blood clotting which had blocked the arteriesīut for a pioneering and radical form of surgery offered only in the UK at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, she would now be dead.
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