HE CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD

Longtime doorman at Queens building thankful for life-saving miracle as holiday approaches

Here’s how long-time Queens doorman Ronald Basdeo felt visiting his physician for an annual physical back in February: He felt just fine, thank you. He had zero complaints about his health. No surprise there. The Richmond Hill resident, age 56, almost never got sick or took a day off. Every day he cranked out pushups. Just a few days earlier, he had shoveled snow off the sidewalks and driveway to his house. He took no medications, and had never spent a day in a hospital.

Little did Ronald suspect that he was anything but okay. In fact, without any hint of warning, he was in big trouble. Soon enough he would finally see the inside of a hospital. And over the coming weeks, he would learn how a certain force of nature — namely love — can bring you back from the dead.

But more about that in a minute. Let’s take a step back first.

Ronald Basdeo came to the United States from Guyana in 1996. He arrived here along with his wife Vidya, his son Andrew and his daughter Sarah. In his home country, he had lived in extreme poverty. He rarely even had socks or underwear to his name. His mother had borne eight children, one right after another, until Ronald lost his father at age 5. His first job here was as a porter in a bowling alley in Queens.

“I came to this country because it’s paradise,” he says.

He started as a doorman in Parker Towers, a three-building apartment complex in my longtime home of Forest Hills in 2001. He received training for the job from the late Carlos Nino, a beloved veteran doorman. Always be polite, Carlos told him, and always — no matter what — be humble.

Ronald took his advice to heart and learned these important lessons well. He brought exuberant high spirits to the job. He was always upbeat, quick to smile and joke and laugh, ready to give or receive a hug or a high five.

Tenants routinely brought him meals on Thanksgiving and Christmas. They delivered so much food that he would call on other doormen and porters to pitch in to polish it off. “God bless you,” Ronald would say.

Across 20 years, Ronald took care of tenants. He saw kids whom he once playfully hoisted into the air grow into adults and get married. He befriended an elderly Holocaust survivor who lived alone and had no relatives left. She gave him the key to her apartment. He occasionally joined her for a breakfast of fresh bagels.

“Residents always treated me nice,” Ronald says. “If they’re happy, I’m happy. But if they hurt, maybe because a family member died, I hurt. And if they cry, I cry, too.”

But now back to his big problem. He took a stress test at his annual physical, running on a treadmill with increasing intensity. The results showed an unusually high heart rate. Something might be wrong, his doctor told him. Further tests confirmed this suspicion, revealing several blockages in his arteries.

“You have a serious blockage,” his doctor said. “You have to go to the hospital right away.”

The staff at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, just to make sure, then ran still more tests on Ronald. The upshot, he learned, was that he would have to undergo surgery. He was going to get stents, tiny tubes, inserted into the blocked passageways in his chest in order to restore proper blood flow.

It would be easy, his doctor promised him. He could leave the hospital and go back to work the next day, almost as if nothing had happened.

But that plan quickly changed. No sooner had the surgeon prepared to install the stents than he discovered a new issue: The arteries were clogged worse than originally diagnosed. Blood flow was all but completely cut off.

An ambulance would now have to be called to rush him to another hospital, North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, L.I.. There, the staff ran still more tests on

Ronald, going at it all night. Finally, a cardiologist gave Ronald the verdict: He was going to need open-heart surgery.

Ronald was shocked.

“Doctor,” he pleaded, “you must have made a mistake. How can this be true? I just worked the other day. Please double-check. Maybe we have other options.”

No, the cardiologist said. He then showed Ronald the X-rays of his chest. Three of his arteries were clogged, he explained. The surgical team would have to cut him open. And it had to happen the very next day. No, Ronald had no other options.

“Could anything happen to me?” he asked the doctor.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “You’re in bad shape. You could get a heart attack. You could die.

“But,” he said, “you could also live.” “I was scared,” Ronald says. “It all happened so suddenly. I thought this could be the end of me.”

Why was this happening, Ronald thought. What’s going to happen to my little daughter?

“We had to prepare for the worst,” he says. “But I swore to do whatever I had to do to save my life.”

He called his family the night before the operation. Everyone on the phone broke down crying.

The operation lasted eight hours. As routinely happens in open-heart surgery, his heart was removed from his chest. All his internal organs stopped functioning. It was as if Ronald had died.

He awoke in the recovery room, the tubes plugged in his mouth, arms and chest feeding him oxygen, nutrients and painkillers. He felt dazed, all hooked up like that, unsure what was going on.

But this much he knew: Hey, Ronald thought, I’m alive! This is me here. I made it!

For the next 48 hours, unable to budge from his bed, Ronald drifted in twilight, half-awake and half-asleep. Blood drained from him into a nearby plastic bag. Agonizing pain kicked in, eventually eased by IV medication.

As Ronald slowly came around, family members were prohibited from visiting him. The only people around him for two days were all the doctors and nurses. He could eat nothing. He talked to no one.

At last, he got the opportunity to speak to his family by phone.

“That was tough, that first conversation,” Ronald says, his voice cracking. “Really tough.”

He goes silent for half a minute, his emotions caught in his throat.

“My wife was crying,” he says. “I was crying.”

It was only a two-minute phone call, yet it summed up a 32-year marriage.

The doctors declared the surgery a success. Five days later, the hospital discharged Ronald. Nurses took him downstairs to the lobby in a wheelchair.

There, Ronald was reunited with his family: his wife, his son Andrew, 31, now with the New York City Department of Health and Human Hygiene; his oldest daughter Sarah, 30, now an administrator at Elmhurst Hospital; and a second daughter, Faith, age 13.

Joyous crying broke out all around. “Best day of my life,” Ronald says.

If you happen to ask Ronald Basdeo how that moment felt, what went through his head coming back from the edge of death and seeing his family again, he’ll be stricken speechless. You’ll have to settle for going on to the next question.

Over the coming days and weeks, as Ronald adapted to post-op life at home, the phone calls started to pour in. Then the texts trickled through, followed by cards and letters. Gifts, too, baskets of fruit and tea and organic honey. A tenant in the building who had known Ronald for his entire tenure collected signatures and personal messages on get-well cards from 75 fellow tenants.

Samir Chraibi, the general manager of Parker Towers, called Ronald to see how he was doing. Adnan Gacevic, resident manager in the building where Ronald manned the door, checked in on him, too.

But none of his colleagues went above and beyond the call of duty more than Joe Marzan, another resident manager in the complex. Joe kept in touch with Ronald’s wife during his hospital stay. He rooted Ronald on as he struggled to recuperate. Knowing the disability left Ronald with no income, Joe started a GoFundMe page for him.

“Our beloved doorman Ronald recently underwent open heart surgery,” Joe wrote. “He and his loving family need our help. Please let’s show him how much we care about him as we wish him a speedy recovery. He is unable to return to work and the bills keep coming in.”

That single act brought in almost $10,000. No fewer than 108 donors, mostly Parker Towers residents, chipped in $50 or $100 each.

“People told me they missed me,” Ronald says. “They were praying for me, praying for my recovery.”

“You are our treasure,” wrote resident Nicole Bramstedt.

“Best doorman ever,” posted resident Jeffrey Wright. “Get well soon, bro.”

“Sending you love and light,” chimed in Georgia and Adrian Byrd.

I’ve known Ronald for two decades now. I’ve always appreciated him and everything he does. He’s always greeted me with a smile and a hearty hello. He’s always asked about my wife and children and granddaughter.

Ronald responded to this outpouring of affection from family, friends and the Parker Towers community as anyone might. “Tears came to my eyes,” he says.

This comeback from a traumatic event is now well underway. At first, forbidden from running or lifting anything heavy, Ronald went for long walks. Some pain persisted. Bending over once in a while left him a little dizzy.

But he was getting there. His cardiologist cleared him to return to his job. The staff at Parker Towers held a surprise party in the lobby to greet him on his arrival, complete with applause, balloons and a cake inscribed with the words “Welcome Back, Ronald.”

Now he’s back at his post five days a week. Reborn.

Ronald worked the lobby on Thanksgiving for 18 straight years. And every Thanksgiving, tenants took homemade meals down to him. One year they brought him 15 plates of food.

Every year, as the holiday approached, his children would plead with him. “Dad, you work every Thanksgiving,” they said. “Can you please stay home this year?” So last year, he took the day off last year for the first time.

But Thanksgiving, 2021 promises to be a Thanksgiving like no other. He’ll be at the dining room table with his family, spilling over with thanks.

“Here I am,” Ronald says. “I made it through.

“The scar on my chest reminds me God gave me a second chance. And I’m so grateful. Grateful for the people God put in my life. It’s impossible for me to feel more grateful than I feel.

“I no longer see my job as just a job or residents as just residents. It’s different now. I feel so much love. My tenants are my family. We’re all family now.

“Every day is blessing,” he says. “I wake up and I’m breathing, and I thank God I’m alive. If you have people caring about you, you can make it through anything.”

Brody, a consultant and essayist, is a former New Yorker now living in Italy. He is the author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”