A teenager who felt “helpless” as she overheard her family’s frantic cries on the phone as her grandmother suffered a cardiac arrest says she is now determined to help save lives as a volunteer with St John Ambulance. While studying for her school exams last year, Zehra Azim, 19, was with her mother, architect Sakina Naqvi, 44, when they received a devastating call that her grandmother, Syeda Sultana Naqvi, 72, had gone into cardiac arrest.
Unable to get to her aunt’s house – where her grandmother was staying – Zehra, who now lives in Mile End, London, and her mother could only listen to the “chaos” unfolding before an ambulance arrived and took her grandmother to hospital. Tragically, Syeda – who was known to her family as Sultana – died two days later, on March 21 2021.
Moving to London from New Delhi in India a few months later, while still grieving for her beloved grandmother, biomedical student Zehra felt determined to educate herself and help others by volunteering with the first aid charity St John Ambulance. Zehra said: “If I had known what to do that night, I could have told my family how to help my grandmother and they might have saved her life.
