At 46, Mark thought he was too healthy to have a heart attack. His story could save YOUR life
John, the anaesthetist, told me when he came to see me on his Sunday round that I had just been ‘incredibly unlucky’. What had happened to me wasn’t linked in any way to lifestyle, or diet.
The walls of our arteries, he explained, have something resembling a mesh that holds back gunk, and from the age of 25, that mesh cracks. Apparently, it happens to all of us, and is rarely a problem.
But occasionally and unusually, the mesh breaks. The blood isn’t happy to find stuff tipped into the bloodstream, and it reacts as it does when anything else goes wrong: it clots. In my case, it clotted at the entrance to the artery that carries 66 per cent of oxygen to the heart: I’d had a heart attack.
‘Unlucky’ was John’s version: mine was the polar opposite. I was ‘lucky’ because of how and when my heart attack had happened. I had 20 minutes — from the time it started — to get help before it was too late, and any of a host of things might have taken me minutes past that. By rights, I should be dead.
Ten days ago, on a Saturday afternoon. I was walking downstairs, having been in my study and then briefly chatting to my eldest daughter, Emily, in her room, and as I reached the bottom I sensed a not particularly alarming pain in my chest and then suddenly felt very ill.
I lay down on the bench alongside our kitchen table for a moment, but realising that I might be about to be sick, decided it would be wise to move towards the loo.
only, I couldn’t really move. I crawled off the bench then lay down on the floor in the foetal position, suddenly feeling terrible.
It was the Fours’ head [rowing race] in London that weekend, and because I’m closely involved with the Cambridge University Boat Club (I coxed for it between 1992 and 1995) and we live near the start, we put up one of their crews in the week before the race every year.
As a result we had three Cambridge oarsmen staying with us. one of them, Piers, walked into the kitchen as I lay on the floor. I heard him say: ‘Are you all right?’ and I replied: ‘You know . . . I really don’t think I am . . . ’
I sat up on the floor, as Piers called Riccardo, his fellow oarsman and a third-year medic, and told him I didn’t look great.
WhEN Riccardo appeared, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with my chin to my chest and my eyes shut. I had started to sweat — a lot. I could hear him asking me if I was all right, but I couldn’t answer. I sat there, sweat dripping off me, eyes shut, head down. ‘Mark, are you all right?’ he kept asking.
Then, just as suddenly, I was fine. I lifted my head, opening my eyes as I looked up. Riccardo was crouching in front of me, Piers behind me. ‘ Wow,’ I said. ‘ That was seriously weird. What on earth just happened there?’
At just about that moment, my wife, Miranda, came in from picking up our second daughter, Lexie, who’d had a hockey match.
She took one look at me and exclaimed about the colour of me and the sweatiness of me. By now, though, I was on my feet, and apparently absolutely fine. But it was all very odd, and someone — I don’t remember who — suggested calling 111 to ask them what it might have been. In truth, it was as much for reasons of curiosity as anything that I went off, in no particular rush, to call from the sitting room. I got through fairly quickly, and started to tell them what had happened.
I felt perfectly well now, lucid and chatting to the woman on the other end of the phone about how strange the whole thing had been.
‘Just to let you know,’ she said as we talked, ‘I have dispatched an ambulance to your address. And I don’t want to worry you, but I have made it high priority. They should be with you within seven minutes. If you have aspirin, take 300mg. When you get off the phone to me, don’t phone anyone else in case we need to call you back.’
I wasn’t particularly concerned but I took the aspirin. And then suddenly — very suddenly — I started to go downhill again. I called out for Miranda, who’d gone upstairs.
By the time she came down, I had slipped off the sofa, where I had felt very uncomfortable, and was lying on the floor, clearly — and rapidly — getting worse. The next thing I was aware of was a flashing blue light coming through the window, and then paramedics rushing into the room.
I was lying between the sofa and an extremely heavy coffee table made of granite, so they couldn’t actually get to me. how Miranda moved it, I have no idea: we have tried to do it between us plenty of times and always need an army to get it off the ground. But somehow she and Piers picked it up.
I remember the paramedics putting me on a trolley and into the ambulance. I remember them saying to Miranda as she got in that I wouldn’t be back tonight.
I remember them then giving me a commentary about where we were all the time, and me telling them I didn’t need one because I knew exactly where we were from the bends of the roads.
All I wanted, I said, was a blanket, because I was perishingly cold and shivering uncontrollably. (I later learned that my temperature had dropped to 30 degrees.)
over hammersmith Bridge we went, heading towards the hammersmith hospital, where they told me a team was on stand by.
But I must have passed out because the next memory is arriving. Amazingly, even at this point I wasn’t actually sure what was happening: it was only as they wheeled me in through a door that said ‘ heart Attack Unit’ that I knew for sure what was going on.
It sounds so ridiculous to say it really, but no one had mentioned the words. And I didn’t see myself as a heart attack candidate: at the age of 46, I have never smoked; I exercise six times a week and at 5ft 10in, weigh 10st; I don’t eat much meat; and I lead a pretty healthy life.
They wheeled me to the lift, where I remember one of them saying, ‘this is usually the slowest part of the journey’. Sure enough, we waited for ages. Apparently, they twice did CPR in the lift, although I remember nothing about it.
I regained consciousness as they wheeled me into a room crammed with people.
Someone asked if I minded them cutting my shirt — my trousers were whipped down, leaving them at my ankles, which I complained about because it was very uncomfortable.
A young lady called Charlotte introduced herself on my left and told me what she was there to do, but I don’t remember what it was. And then I heard a voice say something about the need to hit me now, and BANG! they unleashed the CPR machine on me.
I subsequently learned that they did it five times in total, but for the one time I was conscious I can safely say I have never sworn so loudly in my life. It felt like I was being hit by a lorry, flat on, with my chest taking the full impact.
My next recollection is of lying calmly in a bed and wondering whether, if I opened my eyes, I was going to find myself in hospital or discover that everything was a dream.
Ten days on, I feel fine. A lady came to ask me lots of questions to check that I hadn’t lost any brain function — obviously, a major knock-on effect when you’ve lacked oxygen — and I passed.
ASCAN on my heart before I was discharged after three days revealed that there was no lasting damage. John, the anaesthetist, told me that had I not been fit, the chances that the part of my heart still functioning after the heart attack could have kept me going long enough for me to make it to hospital, would have been incredibly small.
had I been by myself at home, I wouldn’t have called 111 because I thought I was fine.
had the lady who answered the phone not immediately diagnosed what had happened; had there been more traffic; had I not been at home, but more or less anywhere else — on the street, further from a hospital — it would have been curtains.
And even if I had survived, without a lot of quick thinking from a lot of people, I might have done so with a fraction of my brain function, instead of all of it.
Yet despite everything, I never believed at any point that I was about to die.
My wife did, she told me, particularly when things were going pear-shaped in the lift.
From my perspective, the whole experience has been rather surreal. What I do know is that I count myself extraordinarily lucky to be here. Every day’s a bonus day after that. FOR a longer version of this article go to markxdavies.com