A young mum says she almost died after her drink was allegedly spiked with a lethal dose of ketamine when she was out on a hen party in a Dublin City Centre bar.
Aimee, who recently moved from Newcastle to Northern Ireland, came to Dublin for a hen party on April 13. What was meant to be a fun night out with the girls turned into the stuff of nightmares as Aimee’s drink was allegedly spiked with a lethal dose of liquid ketamine.
The 22-year-old mum of a two-year-old little girl says she almost died as her heart stopped at two instances and she got a concussion from the seizures she started having. Aimee said one of the last things she remembers is coming to the table with a drink, “and then that's when I just started acting really funny”.
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The mum doesn’t remember much of what happened then but her friends told her the horrifying story: “Apparently I just started crying, but I was acting like I wasn't crying and then I was laughing. I was acting really strange and my eyes were flicking a bit and they were like, oh, what's going on here?
"And they were going, Aimee, are you okay? And I was sobbing. But I was like, oh yeah, I'm fine, I'm totally fine… They said my whole body language was different. And my eyes were just blank. I was happy but I was sad.
“One of my friends took me to the toilet and she just thought, oh, maybe she's just a bit drunk. She was trying to talk to me and I just closed my eyes and then I completely collapsed on the floor. And then I sort of stood back up and she said it was like I was fighting what was happening to my body. And I just kept collapsing and then sort of coming back off.”
Aimee says that less than five minutes later, her heart stopped. In the meantime, another friend noticed their absence and when she came to check up on them, she saw Aimee on the ground and her friend screaming: “She’s not breathing, she’s not breathing!” They checked her pulse and found nothing and they found her eyes unresponsive.
While the friend who had initially taken Aimee to the bathroom started performing CPR, the other friend went downstairs to ask for help. The woman had to scream: “Her heart stopped, someone please help!”
“And no one knew what to do,” Aimee said. “I don't know who, but someone ended up calling an ambulance for me.” While they waited for the ambulance to arrive they carried the woman to the restaurant area of the bar where it was more quiet.
“I was just seizing loads. Nobody knows how many times I had seizures. It was at 10 plus. That's how I got the concussion – because my head was smacking off the floor.
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The emergency response team had just put a heart monitor on when Aimee crashed again. Luckily, it was much easier to restart her heart this time.
Four days later, Aimee has discharged herself to be close to her toddler. Doctors are telling her they want to put a 24-hour monitor to her because they don’t think her heart is ever going to fully recover and that she could have lifelong problems from this point on.
Aimee told Dublin Live she has had headaches the whole time, she’s been feeling sick and having heart palpitations. She says can’t walk up the stairs without having to stop to catch her breath. She struggles to carry her two-year-old, and she starts feeling “very dizzy” when carrying her down the stairs.
Before the incident, Aimee was perfectly healthy, and she thinks that if she had been someone with heart problems, she would have died instantly.
She was also told by doctors that if she had not had her friend who knew how to perform CPR, she would be dead. Aimee’s heart stopped for the first time at 11pm, her friends told her. She does not know when the ambulance was called but they arrived at 2am.
Aimee is now calling for more awareness. The young mum, who admitted she rarely goes out since she’s busy looking after her child, said: “My heart literally stopped and I nearly didn't come home to my two-year-old daughter. And then it's just like, ‘oh, well just be more careful’... Nobody's realising my little girl nearly didn't have a mum, my friends are actually traumatised.”
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She added: “It just shocks me so much that no one's learned to help and no one actually knows what to do…” Aimee still does not know who actually spiked her drink.
The friend who managed to restart Aimee’s heart works with drug addicts and she told Aimee she’s heard about a trend of people deliberately spiking people with ketamine. Test results from hospital staff later showed that there was a lethal dose of ketamine in her system.
This is why Aimee is now calling for more awareness and for women - especially young women - to be even more vigilant with their drinks and who they are around, as well as to make sure they are with friends who they know are going to look after them no matter what.
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