On what seemed like an ordinary afternoon, 20-year-old Jazmin Garza, a fitness enthusiast from the United States, suddenly felt dizzy before collapsing and convulsing. Her boyfriend realized her heart had stopped and she was no longer breathing. Without hesitation, he performed CPR until paramedics arrived and used a defibrillator to revive her.
But this was only the beginning of her ordeal. On the way to the hospital, Jazmin’s heart stopped multiple times, at one point for as long as five minutes. Each cardiac arrest deprived her organs of oxygen, leaving her lungs, kidneys, and heart severely damaged. Doctors placed her on life support and warned her family: “She needs a miracle to survive and recover into the Jazmin we know.”
Life on the edge
Jazmin later recalled that the incident happened after she had tried an energy drink at the gym — something she normally avoided. “Not long after drinking it, I felt dizzy, pale, and then passed out,” she said. Her boyfriend initially suspected epilepsy, a condition he had never witnessed before.
At the hospital, doctors put Jazmin on three different machines: ECMO to oxygenate her blood, dialysis to help her kidneys, and another device to regulate oxygen levels. A defibrillator was also implanted in her chest to monitor her heart and deliver shocks if necessary. Despite extensive testing, the medical team could not pinpoint the exact cause of her sudden cardiac arrests.
After two weeks, Jazmin began to recover. “Every day I got stronger, and all my heart tests came back normal,” she explained. “They couldn’t find any problems and couldn’t explain why this happened.”
A second chance at life
Jazmin believes that caffeine from the energy drink may have combined with an undetected heart condition to trigger the crisis. “I never paid much attention to my heart health and always mistook palpitations for anxiety,” she admitted.
The experience changed her life in many ways. Both she and her boyfriend lost their jobs while she was in recovery, leaving them with mounting hospital bills. But despite the hardship, Jazmin says she now sees life differently: “I feel like I was given a second life. If this had happened when I was alone, I might not be here. The doctors told me it was a miracle — I was literally one step away from death.”
She now urges others to listen to their bodies and take health concerns seriously before they become life-threatening. Meanwhile, experts warn that the energy drink she consumed contained 200mg of caffeine — about twice the amount in two cups of coffee. While marketed as a source of vitamins and nutrients, high levels of caffeine can be dangerous, particularly for people with underlying heart conditions.