Dicing With Death

It was May 2009 when everything came to a dramatic head.

I had been sleeping on the couch in the living room to give Paul a bit more rest, and he woke me up about 2am and asked me to call an ambulance.

When I had collected my thoughts he told me that he had just been sick and thrown up about two pints of blood - as he was telling me this he suddenly became sick again and I rushed to get a bowl from the kitchen and he promptly threw up what looked like another few litres of blood.

I called for the ambulance service who arrived within about two minutes and they checked his blood pressure which was alarmingly low and immediately put him into the ambulance. I offered to go with him, but he didn't want me there (he thought he was going to die and didn't want me to watch it happen). It seemed an age before the ambulance set off, and I only found out later that he had actually died in the ambulance and they had managed to bring him back, hence the delay.

Apparently, he "died" twice more - once on the way and then again when they got him to Accident and Emergency. He had only one pint of blood left in his system at that point so they immediately gave him blood transfusions and had to resuscitate him. Needless to say he was extremely lucky to have been cared for by an excellent pair of paramedics and then later in hospital.

He spent two weeks in hospital on this occasion and later told me that the worst part of dying was the coming back - a lot of pain from the resuscitation process - and he asked me to promise that if anything like that happened again, I should ask the medics not to resuscitate. It was really hard to do but I made the promise, not really being sure that I could ever carry it out, but for now, at least, I still had him.

More to follow..