"The children were tetchy, and we were worn out from trying to home-school them while working from home, me as a lawyer in the music industry and Alexa as a charity fundraiser. But at least, Alexa said to me, we had made it through January. Then I started making strange noises. Are you joking? she asked. Then, are you choking? She knew it was my heart."
"By the time my dinner tray started slipping from my lap to the floor, I was already clinically dead. My heart had stopped beating and I wasn't breathing. I was having a cardiac arrest. I am alive now only because of my wife and son who got help, my friend and neighbour Peter who gave me cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and the paramedics who eventually got my heart started again 40 minutes after I had stopped breathing."
A man and his wife sat on the sofa during the third Covid lockdown to eat sausages and chips while their tetchy children were home-schooled. Days earlier a cardiologist had advised valve surgery within six months for a leaking heart valve. During the meal the man began making strange noises and then stopped breathing as his heart stopped beating. He suffered a cardiac arrest and became clinically dead. Neighbours and family performed CPR and paramedics restarted his heart after forty minutes. He spent two months hospitalized, returned home visually impaired with brain injury, and experienced a profoundly altered perspective on life. His wife endured uncertainty and fear while he was comatose.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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