The Guardian: A few weeks ago, the TV and radio presenter Richard Bacon was in the news for having spent seven days in an induced coma in Lewisham Hospital in south London after becoming ill with a lung infection on a flight from Los Angeles. Doctors told him afterwards that he had nearly died. My first reaction to this was: how dreadful for him and his family. My second reaction, more or less on top of the first, was: seven days? That’s nothing.
In 2012, I spent three weeks in an induced coma at King’s College Hospital, a few miles down the road from Lewisham, and 51 days in intensive care overall. Often, when I tell people I had pneumonia they are shocked and ask how I caught it. In fact, pneumonia is relatively common and, although still dangerous for the elderly or anyone with a compromised immune system, is usually easily treated with antibiotics. In my case, it was not so straightforward. Like Bacon, for a time I was close to death. At one point one of the consultants told my family I was “the sickest man in London”.It began in what was perhaps the best and most exciting week of my professional life. I had been shortlisted for a major literary award, the Sunday Times Short Story prize, and the day before I became ill I had watched the actor Julian Sands perform my story at an event in central London. Three days later I was due to go to the prize ceremony at Christ Church College, Oxford, but by then I was in bed with what seemed like a bad case of flu. I had stopped eating, I had a pain in my right side and was taking paracetamol and aspirin every four hours to keep my temperature down. Four days after that, hallucinating and unable to stand, I was taken to King’s in an ambulance; four days after that I was put into a coma and intubated – a tube put down my throat to drive oxygen into my lungs and my bloodstream. The next three weeks, unknown to me at the time, were dramatic. I had not responded to the antibiotics and was diagnosed with severe sepsis and then acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) where the lungs inflame, harden, and then stop processing oxygen, a condition which has a 50% mortality rate.
Nevertheless, I survived. Three weeks later, the infection had receded, I was woken from the coma and, following a period of intensive-care psychosis during which I believed the nurses and doctors were trying to kill me, I recovered quickly.
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