Author ROGER LEWIS describes how he cheated death, then received a get-well ... trends now
Last Sunday I collapsed in a Hastings car park and was given CPR by a passer-by. Heart had stopped — I was briefly dead.
I can therefore say with authority there are no Pearly Gates, nor any Fiery Furnace.
Time just stops completely. There’s not even any blackness or blankness to be aware of; or semi-aware of. ‘The anaesthetic from which none come round,’ as Philip Larkin called it.
Cardiac arrest — so the pharmacists from Morrisons ran out with their defibrillator machine and I was shocked back into life.
I regained consciousness to see big hairy faces on top of me, ‘working’ on me, my clothes all cut off. I was fond of that M&S pullover. My Highgrove scarf was also chopped in pieces, my polo shirt later found in a puddle. My glasses and my bag were kindly retrieved by a concerned tramp.
Last Sunday I collapsed in a Hastings car park and was given CPR by a passer-by. Heart had stopped — I was briefly dead, writes author Roger Lewis (pictured)
I can therefore say with authority there are no Pearly Gates, nor any Fiery Furnace
Eventually, I was bundled onto a trolley and, with lots of jerks and bumps, trundled to the ambulance. Police and paramedics everywhere. My wife Anna appeared, I think.
It has been a total nightmare for her, and for my three grown-up children, who materialised at top speed from Tonbridge, Petersfield and St Leonards-on-Sea. My last words nearly were ‘There’s no money’.
Festooned with wires and tubes, the ambulance raced to Alexandra Park and a waiting helicopter. Crowds had gathered — ‘crowd control’ was requested. Hastings hadn’t seen such excitement since an electric eel came up a drain during a storm and bit a pensioner, back in the New Year.
I was taken by Air Ambulance to Eastbourne. The journey was to take six minutes. By road it would have been 40 minutes. I did not have 40 minutes.
During the flight, doctors held my hand. How sweet, I remember thinking. In fact, they were continually checking my fading pulse.
There was a team waiting to receive me. I remember looking at a lot of ceilings, fire alarms and fluorescent lights as I was wheeled off to the Cardiac Unit. I was injected with goodness-knows-what and some sort of science-fiction scanner job rotated about my body and a lot of people were looking at computer screens.
I started to receive nice messages from friends such as Stephen Fry (pictured), Gyles Brandreth, Maureen Lipman, Michael Gove and the crowd from The Oldie magazine
It took about an hour — stents were fitted. I was told that though the chances of croaking during the procedure were one-in-a-hundred, if I didn’t have the procedure death was going to be immediately guaranteed. I signed a consent form without complaint.
About now, I started to feel very nauseous. Not from fear, but the body reacting to the ructions and general uproar. The shock. I was also going to miss The Very Best of Peter Sellers, on Talking Pictures.
Without the procedure, death was guaranteed
Next, I was pushed to the Critical Care Ward and pinioned by both arms to a bed. Drips, oxygen mask, dozens of wires and pipes, lots of drama and activity. Needles, cannulas, catheters.
And pain. My ribs crushed by the CPR. Belly distended. Organs topsy-turvy. I was vomiting blood — really wrenching, agonising bouts of sickness.
