When a heart attack left me in a coma, my hallucinations inspired a novel – and a new life books

HeyOn the evening of Monday 1 February 2021, during the third coronavirus lockdown, my wife Alexa and I sat on the sofa eating hot dogs and chips in front of the TV. The kids were cranky, and we were tired of trying to homeschool them while working from home, me as a music industry lawyer and Alexa as a charity fundraiser. But at least, Alexa told me, we made it through January.

Then it started making strange noises. “Are you kidding?” I asked. Then “Are you choking?”

She knew it was my heart. The other day, my cardiologist told me that I would need surgery within the next six months to fix a leaky valve that had been getting worse for years.

“What if you don’t have the surgery?” Alexa was asked. “I would drop dead,” I answered. I was kidding—I didn’t think my heart problem was that serious—but as it turns out, I was right. By the time the dinner tray started sliding from my lap to the floor, I was already brain dead. My heart had stopped beating and I couldn’t breathe. I was having a heart attack.

I’m only alive now thanks to my wife and son who received help, my friend and neighbor Peter who gave me CPR, and the paramedics who eventually saved my heart again – 40 minutes after I stopped breathing.

I was taken to the hospital in a state of deep unconsciousness, and Alexa was left standing in our living room, where the furniture had been pushed aside and there was mud on the floor and debris from paramedics’ equipment strewn everywhere.

It would be two months before I returned home, with poor eyesight and a brain injury, and my perspective on life completely changed.

The days following my cardiac arrest were a time of complete contradiction: Alexa was having a nightmare, not knowing whether I was going to live or die, while I was in a coma, oblivious to what was happening.

Then I woke up on Friday. The hospital set up a video call for me to talk to Alexa, but it didn’t make any sense. The next day, it became clear that I was blind. That’s when doctors started talking to Alexa about a brain injury caused by lack of oxygen, and her relief at being alive turned into fear about what this might mean.

A few days later, Alexa was allowed to visit me in the hospital as an exception to the lockdown rules; The doctors thought it could help me because I was so confused and disoriented. I was hallucinating too. When she arrived, I had just had a brain scan, and when she asked me about it, I told her I had been to the premiere of a movie about bees.

Over the next few days, when Alexa wasn’t visiting, we would make video calls more often. She says I was laughing and joking like I was having a dinner party, completely unaware of what had happened. She and the doctors and nurses would repeatedly tell me that I had gone into cardiac arrest and that I had suffered a brain injury, but I would immediately forget anything that was said to me.

After weeks of neurorehabilitation, I underwent extensive testing that found my memory and other cognitive functions were in the bottom 2% of the population. One day, I asked at the hospital why my mother wasn’t visiting, and Alexa had to tell me that she had died three years ago.

During the second week, my vision began to return, but only partially, and I had difficulty comprehending what I was seeing. I remember sitting by the hospital window one day, feeling the cool air seeping in through the window frames, and longing to breathe it in. It had been snowing all night, and I was looking at Hampstead Heath, unable to understand why it was so white.

All this time, the hallucinations continued – caused by the brain trying to compensate for the loss of vision. One of them had a great influence on me, and in fact, this novel is my second life. It came from him.

In it, I was in a rural hospital in Dublin, sometime in the past. I was alone in bed in a small, dark room. The door was open, and outside there was a group of young nurses with Irish accents sitting around a table in the soft glow of an oil lamp, talking very quietly. Grumble, really. I felt very cared for, as if nothing could hurt me, and it had a profound effect on me.

I think I was having those hallucinations because I was taken care of that way in real life. I still remember and feel grateful for the extreme kindness shown by the doctors, nurses and other people working in the hospitals where I stayed, and those who have cared for me ever since.

Around that time, I felt like a child with a belly full of milk should feel: content and isolated from the world. Before, I was trying to balance stressful work, lockdown and homeschooling. Now I sat or lay down for hours without thinking about anything, floating through time. The busy part of my mind was turned off, and all I experienced were sensations, not thoughts. It was like the silence following a massive crash.

When I came home from the hospital, I wanted to hold on to that feeling, record it, and I started writing. I can see now that through my writing I was creating a world that reflected the calm in which I was living. I was building a sanctuary where I could go to get that feeling of complete peace.

I remember one hot day, when I was lying outside and writing in my notebook. I continued like this, writing small amounts by hand, once every few days, often forgetting what I had written before, and I was also hampered by dyslexia and extreme fatigue caused by a brain injury.

As I wrote slowly over the next three years, I realized how radically my experience had changed me. I see the world differently now, and although what I can do is much more limited than before, my life feels freer and more open.

It was important to me to have a connection with the works of my late mother, the writer Helen Dunmore. My main character is called Jago, which is the name of the little boy in a picture book that my mother and I worked on together years ago. I also portrayed the character Granny Carne from my mother’s Cornish Ingo books, a wise woman as old as the hills who helps Jago adjust to his life after suffering the same health crisis as her. So, although I can’t tell my mother about my book, I’m glad there’s a thread through time that connects her work to mine.

When I finished writing the novel, I put it aside and did nothing with it. Trying to publish it was a step too far back in the world.

But I also knew that I needed more from life than just drifting, and that I had a second chance, so I submitted my novel. When I was offered a publishing deal for it, I felt like I was getting a fresh start, and I knew writing was what I would do.

In a way, this “my second life” is not only about Jaggu’s second life, but about my life as well. I have a lot of problems, but I’m alive, I can see, I have my family and friends, and I can write. My greatest hope for my novel is that it leaves readers feeling uplifted and with the sense of peace, contentment, and possibility that it has given me.