It all started with a loud and irritating snoring that woke up Lisa Lee, a mother of one. Her boyfriend, she thought, was purposely doing it to irritate her.
After a while, Lee couldn’t take it anymore, so she kicked Lewis Little, her boyfriend, out of the bed and ordered him to shut up. She had no idea that Little was only taking his very final breath.
Little, 25, did not move a muscle when Lee shouted at him to stop snoring. The inaction prompted her to take a closer look at him, only to discover that her boyfriend was no more. His heart had stopped beating.
“I felt that the sheets were wet, from Lewis’s bodily fluids. I knew something was wrong. I turned the lights on and his face was purple. He wasn’t breathing,” Lee recalls.
She immediately called an ambulance, which unfortunately took like forever to arrive. It is reported that Little had died some hours earlier before he started ‘snoring’.
“They pronounced him dead at the hospital. I later found out that the snoring sound was the air leaving his body,” says heartbroken Lee.
Little had reportedly been diagnosed with a rare heart condition. Doctors called it Brugada syndrome. They, however, assured Lee that her boyfriend Little was a low risk suffered of the disorder. So she basically had no reason to panic, going by the hope-lifting diagnosis.
“We were told that Lewis would have a long, happy and healthy life. But he died one year after diagnosis,” says Lee, who is also 25 years old, adding that the death of her lover really destroyed her and their son Tyler.
Lee has now embarked on a campaign to get people with the deadly heart condition (that took her boyfriend) to get fitted with implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), a device that can restart someone’s heart.
“I believe that ICD can save many people’s lives, whether the person is low or high risk sufferer of the disorder. It could have saved Little,” says Lee.
The disease, she adds, is silent killer, which is why she is raising awareness of it to make sure that something is done about it, a bold move indeed for a young mother who just lost the father of her child.
