A WOMAN who found her husband dying on the floor saved his life using emergency first aid she had seen on a tv show.

Peter Pask, 49, had suffered a heart attack and went into cardiac arrest, but mum-of-two Natasha managed to keep him alive for eight minutes until an ambulance arrived.

MORE TOP STORIES:

Paramedics praised Mrs Pask’s actions, but the modest 28-year-old said: “What else was I going to do? I’m his wife.”

Delivery driver Mr Pask, of Angela Street, Mill Hill, Blackburn, collapsed on the couple’s living room sofa while his wife was in bed and children Charley, eight, and Tyler, three asleep.

Mrs Pask said she got out of bed at 3am ‘with an eerie feeling’ before going downstairs and finding her husband of 18 months ‘practically dead’.

She said: “He was turning grey and his lips were blue. I thought he was dead.

“My instinct was just to run over to him and help. I don’t have any medical training, not even a first aid course, but I had watched the TV show just a few nights before.

“I laid him straight because he was slumped over. I grabbed his legs and they were so cold to touch. I don’t know how long he was there for. I checked all over for a pulse and he wasn’t breathing either.

“I started the chest compressions using the method they showed on 999: What’s Your Emergency?. I don’t know where it came from. I had the ambulance operator on speaker-phone and they kept me calm.”

Three paramedics arrived and used a defibrillator four times to revive Mr Pask, before taking him to Royal Blackburn Hospital, where he was made stable.

Mr Pask was transferred to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) in Blackpool Victoria Hospital later that morning, where he underwent heart surgery to repair a bleeding aorta.

He remained in the CICU for seven days and was finally allowed home to his family on Friday after two weeks in hospital overall.

Mr Pask, who works for Blackburn firm Mercer and Sons, said he could not praise his wife, the paramedics and hospital staff enough for keeping him alive.

He said: “I had no idea what happened. I just remember waking up about a week later and wondering where I was.

“When I was told what happened, I just said to Natasha, ‘Thank you very much. You saved my life.’ “There’s nothing else I can say. The staff in both hospitals were brilliant too.”

Mrs Pask, a former student at St Wilfrid’s CE Academy, posted a letter of thanks on the North West Ambulance Service’s Facebook page, which has received more than 1,000 likes.

Caroline Terry, one of the paramedics who treated Mr Pask at the scene, said: “Natasha, what you did was so brave and you should be so incredibly proud of your quick thinking and calm actions.

“You were his heartbeat. When we arrived your CPR had given our treatment the best possible chance of working.”

The couple, who have been together for seven years, said they were now ‘taking it easy’ and looking forward to Christmas with the kids and their pet cat, Alfie.

Mrs Pask, a full-time mum, said: “The kids know daddy has had a poorly heart but Tyler doesn’t really understand. They have still got their dad, and that’s all that matters.

“I don’t feel like I did anything heroic. What else was I going to do? I’m his wife. But I’ve told him that’s his Christmas present sorted anyway.”