A year ago yesterday my heart stopped after my morning run and after 20 minutes it was started again when an ambulance finally arrived as fast as it could from the nearest hospital and shocked me back to life. During that 20 minutes I was kept alive by 2 of my amazing neighbours and my wife who all have a great deal of knowledge about CPR and first aid and so you see I am incredibly lucky that they all knew what to do. In the intervening months bewtween then and now I've learned a great deal more about just how incredibly lucky I am. The British Heart Foundations website maintain up to date statistics about the number of people who suffer 'out of hopsital' cardiac arrests each year. It's ~35,000 people and 9 out of 10 (that's 31,500) of those people do not survive. That means that on the 6th February 2021 I became one of the 3,500 who did. To say last year was the worse year of my life then isn't an understatement but it's a statement I am overjoyed to be able to type so I'll type it again "last year was the worse year of my life". I'm overjoyed because it ends in the word 'life'. Every single day since then, when I wake up I remind myself that I'm still alive and that I'm incredibly lucky to be.

The thing is though, every single time I suddenly realise how thin the thread was by which my life hung in the balance last year I can't help but think just how truly awful this year would have been for all of the people in my life that I love and care about. What if Jen, Sue and Leslie hadn't been skilful and knowledgeable enough to save me. Then that gets me thinking about the 31,500 groups of families and friends that over the last 12 months haven't still got the person they love who had a cardiac arrest still around to kiss, hug, fall asleep with, take silly selfies with, go for dog walks with or do any of the other mizillion and one things that make up 'life'.

I'm not someone you ever would have considered a candidate for a heart attack or cardiac arrest. I was a British Army Physical Training Instructor for over a decade from my early 20s to mid 30s and then I became a civilian fitness instructor, running fitness classes for the people of Perth and Dundee. I never go to fast food outlets and my amazing wife cooks delicious meals for us both from fresh ingredients, we don't eat processed foods, we never have. I simply had a family history and one morning after some heavy physical exertion a blockage occured right at the very top of my heart in the coronary artery which pretty much stopped all blood flow to the heart muscle. So what I'm saying is that what happened to me could happen to anyone...anyone at all.

I often feel incredibly guilty that I'm here and 9 out of 10 other people who had the same thing happen aren't and if I'm completely honest I simply don't know how I would feel if a person in my little village or even all the other nearby village and towns died and didn't need to because I didn't make the effort to increase thier chances of survival.

So what I'd like to ask any one reading this is to help me change The British Heart Foundations statistics from 1 in 10. Maybe change it to 2 in 10 if possible. I know that seems optimistic but I'm happy to spend the rest of the life (Yippee I get to type it again....life, life, LIFE) getting to that 2 in 10. Maybe i can get there by saving just one person's life at a time. So how about we aim for 1.1 in 10 people survive cardiac arrest in the UK first and see where we get to from there.

My first goal is to raise enough money to get a defibrillator for my beautiful little village of Gateside and then once I've helped make Gateside just a little safer for my friends and neighbours my long term goals will be to help make all of the other villages in Fife and then Scotland a little safer. If I can do that and we still haven't changed that 1 in 10 to 2 in 10 then let's keep going and see where else in the UK we can work together to fund defibrillators for.

I'm really sorry this post is so long I really did try to keep it short, I promise. But it would be unforgiveable of me not to to say the most important thing of all now that I'm talking about my cardiac arrest on social media for the first time since it happened. The thing I need to do is to give my unreserved and most heartfelt (pun intended) THANK YOU to every single member of the NHS working as a team of teams. The team that initially kept me alive (The Scottish Ambulance Service in Fife) then the team who stabilised me (The A & E dept, Victoria Hospital Kirkcaldy) to allow me to be moved to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary where the Intensive Treatment Unit team put me into a coma and turned me into a frosticle for a week to prevent brain damage. From there I was looked after by the amazing doctors and nurses of ERI's Cardiac HDU team. Finally I need to thank the team at VHK's Cardiac ward for making sure I was healthy enough to go back home to my wife. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU....You simply are the most incredible people.