Can you point to any source for this? I have not been able to find any report of someone suddenly dying from cardiac problems days after an electric shock. It sounds kinda plausible, but I wonder if it is an urban legend.
People lose limbs or die from severe electric burns, and people can die from cardiac arrest immediately after being shocked, but are there really cases where people have cardiac arrest days after an electric shock?
I've heard this idea before, that you can die hours or days after an electric shock without realizing anything is wrong, but I think it is very rare.
An electrical injury can certainly trigger an abnormal heart rhythm, but you would probably notice most of those and, hopefully, go get a cardiogram.
If you felt normal, but had a serious electrical injury to the heart that would later lead to fibrillation, one would have to postulate some sort of abnormal re-entrant (sort-of circular) depolarization current in the heart muscle that was very regular, say 60 beats per minute, but that was prone to deteriorate into fibrillation over time.
That is what I recall about the matter, off the top of my head.
Do they use 230V in Portugal?
In NZ I'd never seen a pull cord until I moved to the UK. All of our electrics in bathrooms are certified for use around water there, including proper breakers/multiple RCDs etc.
I think modernised UK homes that are now up to date often forgo the pull cords.
Just a moment of shock, then pain, followed by lots of cursing and then gratitude it wasn't worse.
From an engineer here, let's not continue this dangerous trope.
High voltage breaks down resistance and allows current to flow. Current can only flow in the presence of voltage.
Proof:
A 1V 1000A power supply won't kill any one and won't give a shock. A 2000V .001A power supply might give quite a shock on the other hand, and depending upon any capacitance in the supply might just as well prove fatal.
It very well could if the frequency is high enough. The skin is like a capacitor which acts like a short circuit at high frequency. DC is much less dangerous than AC at the same current/voltage for this reason.
What does the capacitor supply, that the PSU can't? Could it be discharge current?
Before you accuse me of repeating dangerous tropes, please consider making sure to discuss it with the folks at VDE, because this is what it says in their (and the equivalent european) product norms and norms for electrical installations.
When touching the positive pole of a 1V 1000A PSU (I assume DC) you won't have 1000A flowing through your body. It is not the rating current of the PSU that kills you, but the actual current going through your body. And how well that current will flow through your body depends on many things, including voltage, frequency (if we are talking AC), contact resistances, skin resistance, the internal resistance of your body, how big you are, your ground connection resistance, the duration of the current flow, etc.
There is a reason we use high AC voltage for transportation of currents for long distances.
All else equal, twice the voltage yields twice the current (and 4x the power).
So while yes, it's the current that kills you, in the majority of circumstances high voltage = high current. Outside of explicitly current-limited setups (e.g. a Van de Graaff generator or a desktop ionizer), most higher voltage devices will kill you more easily.
And so the "voltage doesn't kill" meme more often than not (IMO) gives laymen an undue sense of safety when working with higher voltages, at the benefit of appealing to the more electrically-inclined crowds sense of "being precisely correct".
Just look at the dozens deaths a year from people messing with microwave transformers, trying to make some pretty wood lightning art, for an example of this.
I = V/R
It's as simple as that. A high enough voltage will find a current path ionizing the air or whatever is in it's way. A high current doesn't doesn't do that by itself.
That's why you see warning signs for "HIGH VOLTAGE" but not "HIGH CURRENT".
What kills people is current, not voltage. With AC having your heart beat 50 times a second can also cause you to die hours or even days after receiving a shock, but even that requires enough current to flow and cross your skin resistance. Go to ghe hospital even if you are alive and feel well after an electrical shock! Your heart may have suffered from this.
That being said, there can be many things at play here. E.g. there could have been contact resistance between the live wire and the fixture, which would mean the current that could have flown through your body was limited by that resistance. The reason why you can touch an insulated wire is because there are megaohms of resistance between your hand and the wire. Lower that resistance gradually and there will be a point where you feel the electricity slightly, lower ot more and there is the shock. The most hurtful thing would piercing a wire through the skin, because then the skin resistance is gone.
Aside from contact resistance it could also be that the bath the current took through your body was good (so more on the surface, not across the heart, but down one side of the body and so on).
That being said, your description of the shock does not sound like a fully fledged 230V 50Hz shock to me (certified electical engineer). In my experience you will definitely notice it right away, e.g. because you suddenly just see black and a sharp pain including with extreme vibrations that feel like pure energy is hitting you with a brick in the face. Feeling the vibration like you described it and then making the decision to let go sounds like only a very small current was flowing.