"Ophelia" wrote in message
...

Oh my! What a frightening experience You are lucky to have such a
clever wife!

I hope all is well now??

Yes it is thanks. I remember very little of it beyond coming inside for a
rest after working in the garden on a hot sultry day, getting undressed to
have a cool shower, standing up, and... nothing. My wife when she followed
me inside thought "I'd better - in case he has a heart attack" which is
incredibly prescient since I'd no history of heart trouble. She was
downstairs when she heard a loud thump as I fell on the floor. Ambulances,
CPR, adrenaline, fire brigade - I was not aware of any of it. The next I
remember was waking up in hospital about two weeks later to hear random
words like "Winehouse", "Breivik", "gun attack", "Norway" and "News of the
World" - which was the nurses discussing all the news stories that had been
happening while I'd been away with the fairies. My wife and my parents were
really put through the emotional wringer: they were told that x% of people
survived full cardiac arrest for over two hours, and of those, only y%
survived without brain damage or other organ failure (x and y are small
numbers). At one stage they thought my kidneys had packed up, and then
discovered that the wee-wee tube was kinked :-) And at one point they were
asked the worst question that any doctor can ask: does he carry an organ
donor card. But my wife insisted on more brain-function tests and these came
back healthy. She described going home one night full of doom and gloom
about my chances, getting a very pessimistic report from a very rude nurse
when she arrived the following morning - and then seeing me give her a big
cheesy grin of recognition. "He's all right!" she thought. We weren't
actually married at the time, and apparently the first words I mouthed to
her (I couldn't actually talk because I still had a breathing tube in my
neck) were "Marry me". She said "Yes" ;-)

What was odd was my memory. I remembered most things - enough to know who
Amy Winehouse had been, that News of the World had been a newspaper, what my
name was, where I lived etc. But when my wife asked me "where have we just
been on holiday" and "where's that place on the hill that we went to the day
before your heart attack" I hadn't the foggiest. Recent memories are the
longest to return, apparently, But what was odd was that when I *did* start
to remember, after a lot of prompting and subtle hints, the answers (Isle of
Skye and Scarborough Castle) to her two questions, the memories didn't come
back little by little. It was as if someone turned a key and unlocked *all*
the memories at once.

Every year we celebrate my "re-birthday" on the day it happened. I remember
working with a guy whose legs were paralysed after a motor bike accident in
his youth, and one day he gathered us all together and made a little speech
to say "It was 32 years ago since the day I was paralysed. I always
celebrate that day, which might seem odd, but things could have been so
different. My mate on the bike behind me didn't make it." Now having my own
day to celebrate, I can understand more fully that sometimes you celebrate
something bad... which could have been a whole lot worse.

While I was in hospital I was told that one of the three crucial "coronary"
arteries which feed the heart itself had been blocked and had been cleared,
but that the other two would need unblocking later (reading between the
lines "if I survived"). But when I went back for a clinic a month later, for
a scan of my heart, they could find no trace of those narrowings. The guy
even called in two colleagues to make sure. Goodness knows what happened to
the blockages. All I can assume is that the original tests when I was first
brought in were wrong.

It's taken my wife a long time to stop worrying about how I am when she's at
work and I'm at home or out seeing a client and she hasn't heard from me for
a few hours. Skype, for quick "how are you - just checking you're still
alive" chats, has been a lifesend.

Lasting effects? I leave a longer gap from the car ahead of me (good thing
my perception of distance isn't the other way round). I have lost some of my
confidence in my abilities. I'm not quite as resourceful at researching
technical things and weighing up the pros and cons of alternatives. But when
we go out for a bike ride, I'm the one who gets up the hill quicker and is
less out of breath - well that was the case until she bought an electric
bike to keep up with me. I've escaped remarkably lightly. I'm not in any way
religious and find talk of worship, praise, belief-without-proof a foreign
language, but I have to admit, *someone* must have been on my side that day.