Richard Bacon has revealed that doctors expected him to die from a near-fatal lung infection.
The TV presenter appeared on today’s Good Morning Britain (September 25) to talk about the life-threatening illness that led to him being put in a six-day coma.
“It’s good to be alive,” he told GMB.
“It was bad luck – I breathed something in,” Richard said of his lung infection. “The working theory, they never really worked out what it was exactly, is that I got on the plane at the wrong time and the pressurised cabin caused this infection in both of my lungs to explode everywhere.”
Opening up about his wife Rebecca’s support, he added: “As they were putting me in the coma she rubbed my feet and said: ‘Don’t walk towards the white light’, which I think was a joke, but I’m not entirely sure.
“When I got off the plane I couldn’t breathe properly. I did something really stupid which is, I believed that because I go to the gym a lot I’d kind of be fine,” Richard continued.
“I was going twice a day to the gym. Obviously working on your biceps has no impact on what’s going on in your lungs. So, I left it 18 hours. When I got to A&E, that’s when it all kicked off.
“I was very, very close to death. They went from telling me I needed to be in an induced coma to being in a coma in 4 minutes. They said to me afterwards, ‘It wasn’t that you might die, we expected you to die’. I was the illest person in Lewisham hospital.”
Richard went on to reveal that waking from his coma “was the worst day of my life”, and that being told he needed to go into an induced coma “was the most shocking moment”.
“I felt very bad for Rebecca,” he said. “There was one point where they had the crash equipment hovering over me, my body turned blue, there was a moment when they believed I was going to die.
“She’d been given that impression. I find out afterwards and it’s sort of a story. For her it was a phone by the bed, waiting every second waiting for that call to come in that her husband had died.”
Fortunately, Richard said he now feels “really good” and praised the hospital and the NHS for saving his life.
“In 2012 Jeremy Hunt tried to close it [Lewisham hospital’s A&E] down. The lead consultant said to me, ‘If they had succeeded in closing that down, the next A&E would have been too far away and you would have died’.
“If you think about the problems that south London has at the moment with violence, the idea that they should have one less hospital, it’s obviously ridiculous.”
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays on ITV from 6.30am.
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