I died from a heart attack in a car park – then was brought back by paramedics. This is

A SECOND ACT: WHAT NEARLY DYING TEACHES US ABOUT REALLY LIVING by Dr Matt Morgan (Simon & Schuster £20, 272pp)

This is the scariest book I have ever read in my entire life – because it is about my death.

Dr Matt Morgan, a top consultant in an intensive care unit, tells us that out of any 100 people who suffer a cardiac arrest outside of hospital, only ten will reach hospital alive.

Of those ten, five will die quite quickly and three will survive, ‘but with severe brain injury, meaning life will never be the same again’.

Only two people will ‘return for their Second Act. The two per cent club’.

I am a member of that club (poor Tony Slattery was not so fortunate), which is more exclusive than the Garrick, and I still find it difficult to face the truth about what happened.

It was about 18 months ago, and down I went, in a supermarket car park. The next thing I knew there were bearded blokes on top of me – I thought I was back in Wales and the scrum had collapsed. But they were the paramedics.

Near Death: Roger Lewis knows first hand what it is like to come back from the brink 

I was bundled on to a trolley, wheeled into an ambulance, which took me a few hundred yards, blue flights flashing, to a waiting helicopter.

I thought my new friends, the bearded blokes, were being so sweet, holding my hand. In fact, they were checking for a pulse, to see if I was still alive.

I then recall seeing the ceiling whizz by, as I was rushed along corridors to surgery. The blood vessels around my heart were opened by a chap on a stool using wires threaded through the artery in my right wrist.

Owing to the drugs pumped into me, I kept vomiting – which is why the X-ray lens was covered with what looked like an elasticated plastic shower cap.

What I didn’t know about – and didn’t want even to hear about for a long time afterwards – was the drama in the car park, when I was effectively dead.

Passers-by had started giving me vigorous CPR. As Morgan says, this is essential to reduce or obviate brain damage, sustaining the patient and ‘bring them back for a Second Act’.

‘The longer the delay, the more the brain is starved of blood,’ and the brain is a hungry organ, ‘needing three times the amount of oxygen-rich blood’ than any part of the body, otherwise within seconds, millions of nerve cells expire.

I was so lucky – top tip: if you have a heart attack, do it where there are plenty of people about.

One of my saviours was Akela from the local Scout troop, who the previous week had been on a course about CPR.

Another was a midwife, who gave me the kiss of life – which explains why I was covered with purple lipstick. 

The third was the lady from the pharmacy, who knew the whereabouts of, and how to deploy, the defibrillator, which administered electric shocks to restart and reset my abnormal heart rhythms.

Morgan insists CPR should be taught in schools, as an essential part of the curriculum, more important than algebra.

Holding one palm on top of the other, you press the middle of the breast bone, a procedure which will push, then pull, blood in and out of the heart.

You press very firmly, to the beat of the Bee Gees: ‘Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.’

The people doing this to me were so enthusiastic, my ribs were smashed – which shows how hard they worked to get a ‘return of spontaneous circulation,’ i.e. a pulse.

You have to keep going with the CPR until the emergency services turn up to inject the patient with adrenaline and place them on a portable life-support machine.

I must say, this is all preferable to what they did in Shakespeare’s day, which was to blow smoke up the patient’s bottom with a pair of bellows.

Anyway, there I suddenly was on the ward, my family around me looking ashen. Morgan says he has around 200 conversations a year, telling loved ones the patient has died. People scream, cry, laugh, hit the wall. ‘They beg us to be wrong.’

Essential: Dr Morgan believes CPR should be taught in schools as an essential part of the curriculum, more important than algebra

A Second Act is a brave and candid medical thriller by a doctor who spends his shifts treating severe organ failure and infection, lungs that won’t breathe and kidneys which have ceased to filtrate.

One in five of us will pitch up and die in an intensive care unit (ICU).

Morgan’s day is filled with ‘a symphony of beeps and hums from sophisticated machinery’ – the whirring and rattling of ventilators, medication pumps, dialysis apparatus and monitors.

Constructed around a series of case histories, the book tells us of patients brought back to life after being hit by lightning – 300 million volts (‘enough to power Cardiff for a day’); after having drowned; after having been buried under snow; after an overdose; after rugby injuries; or after a heart transplant – the new ticker arrives in a TransMedics Organ Care System box, costing hundreds of thousands.

For myself, my ‘event’ was the result of intolerable strain, trying to finish a book in which I’d been absorbed for over a decade. I had no time to recuperate either, as there were the proofs to sort out, the editing processes to endure.

I was particularly interested in Morgan’s sections on what it is like long-term for the ‘two per cent club’ members, as ‘the psychological toll can be profound’.

You’d think a patient would be overjoyed to bounce back. But as Morgan says, after dropping dead and being revived, a person faces up to questions of life’s purpose, the fragility of existence, priorities. ‘Anxiety and depression can linger,’ along with financial burdens and ‘severe ongoing care needs’.

Bodies can get back to normal, but the mind doesn’t. One of Morgan’s patients says: ‘It was a struggle. I should have been so happy, but I was not. I just kept asking why? Why me? Why did I survive? Why am I alive?’

This ‘confrontation with existential realities’ is common. Morgan has had a patient who, having cheated death once, became ‘so self-destructive, he would wake up in police cells’.

For those who (like Our Lord) died and were resurrected, there is a lot of survivor’s guilt. One patient typically told Morgan he ‘didn’t feel he deserved to be alive’. It’s like a version of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Morgan’s advice is don’t make big, unrealistic plans. Live for the small moments, for then the mundane becomes meaningful. Slow down – and remember, ‘touching the lives of others is the best feeling in the world’.

With reference to the subtitle –what nearly dying tells us about living – Morgan is keen for people not to leave emotional loose ends.

You shouldn’t wait for the funeral before saying nice things about a person. Tell them when they are still alive and can be appreciative. Tell them out loud how much you love them. Tell them right now, ‘because you may not get a second chance’.

For myself I am suddenly an old fella on pills and five insulin injections a day. Evelyn Waugh died of a heart attack aged 62 while on the lavatory. Was that what I was trying to emulate?