Widow Shares Warning After Husband’s 1-Per-Day Energy Drink Habit Led to Fatal Heart Attack

(Illustration - Shutterstock)

A widow is striving to raise awareness of the dangers of high-caffeine energy drinks after losing her husband to a heart attack.

Cassondra Reynolds, of Rancho Santa Margarita, California, lost her husband, John, in February 2011. John was just 41 years old when he died.

“He was my only family,” Cassondra shared, per the Daily Mail. “[H]e was my everything and he was my soul mate and now he’s gone.”

John, a mechanic, regularly worked night shifts and developed a habit of drinking an energy drink at the beginning of every shift to help him stay awake. Later, a doctor would reveal to Cassondra that this habit is “like playing Russian roulette with your life.”

On the morning of Feb. 5, 2011, Cassondra woke to hear John gasping for breath. She called for an ambulance and administered CPR until help arrived.

“I was in a state of panic and shock,” Cassondra recalled, “because I had no idea what was happening to my husband.”

At the hospital, John was taken to the cardiac intensive care ward and placed in a medically induced coma. The couple’s three sons, then aged 5, 6, and 8, watched as their father struggled to survive.

“When he went to the hospital,” Cassondra explained, “the doctors told me that his sugar levels were sky high and were asking me all sorts of questions about his lifestyle.”

The cardiologist claimed that John’s heart was as strong as a 25-year-old’s. However, when Cassondra informed the medical team that her husband regularly consumed energy drinks, the doctor responded that even one energy drink per day had the capacity to throw off the heart’s natural rhythm and even induce cardiac arrest.

Fourteen days after John’s admission to the hospital, he was declared brain dead. Cassondra made the devastating decision to have his life support machine turned off, and the couple’s boys had to say a final goodbye to their father.

“He was a really good dad and the best husband,” Cassondra explained. “[W]atching him take his last breath was the most painful thing I have ever experienced. I felt like my heart was physically breaking.”

Tragically, due to a bureaucratic error, John’s organs were not donated upon his passing; the father of three was a registered organ donor. The oversight added an extra dimension to Cassondra’s already unbearable loss.

On Nov. 14, 2018, almost eight years after her husband’s passing, Cassondra took to Facebook to urge her followers to remember John and share his story in the name of helping others.

“This is so important that people help spread awareness on the dangers of energy drinks even if you don’t drink them,” she pleaded. “Please help me help others. People are dying! Children are dying.”

Cassondra was also inspired to share John’s story on the Love What Matters blog site after an influx of love and support from members of the public. “The outpouring of kindness, encouraging messages, and love being sent to my children and myself has been overwhelming,” Cassondra wrote.

The mom’s bitter disappointment over her husband’s failed organ donation was also assuaged by learning something important; hundreds of people had been inspired to give up energy drinks after reading of the Reynolds family’s ordeal.

“The amount of people I have heard from has far exceeded the 12 people [John] would have helped with his organ donation,” Cassondra explained, as per Love What Matters, “and my husband’s death now does have purpose.”

Illustration - Shutterstock | Keith Homan

Nine years after John’s death, Cassondra, now 49, has turned her attention toward fighting for laws that will restrict the consumption of energy drinks in the United States. She launched a Facebook group called Energy Drink and Pre-Workout Awareness, and the group, to date, has over 11,000 members.

“I am hoping by continuing to share, the right people will be somehow put in my path to get the word out on a much larger scale,” Cassondra reflected, “and hopefully induce change.”