I am a writer from Bristol in the South-West of England, now living in London with my wife and two children. I have been writing for many years, but paradoxically it wasn’t until I sustained a severe brain injury that I was able to write my novel, This, my second life, which will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in spring 2026. The brain injury changed the way I think and see the world around me, and it unlocked something in my writing.

My brain injury was caused by a cardiac arrest. During the evening of 1st February 2021, I was having dinner with my wife when my heart stopped beating and I stopped breathing. I was clinically dead. My wife sent our son to our neighbour to get help while she called for an ambulance. The phone operator told her to start CPR straight away and Peter, my friend and neighbour, began the chest compressions.

By the time the paramedics managed to resuscitate me, I hadn’t had a heartbeat or been breathing for about forty minutes. I had sustained a severe brain injury from the lack of oxygen, although that wouldn’t become clear until I after I woke up from the coma in the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead, London, the same hospital that my daughter was born in nine years before. I still feel exceptionally lucky. Very few people survive a cardiac arrest. My life was saved by my wife, my son, the 999 operator, my friend Peter, the paramedics who didn’t give up when their efforts weren’t working, and the doctors and nurses at the Royal Free Hospital. I often think about that and feel very grateful.

I don’t remember waking up from the coma, but I do remember the feeling I had around that time. I felt completely at peace, as if I was weightless, floating through time. I wasn’t aware of what had happened and I wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen next. I felt as a baby must feel. I had no worries, hardly any thoughts at all, just sensations.

My memories of being in that first hospital are disconnected snapshots. I was blind at first and hallucinating as my brain tried to compensate for the sudden loss of vision. One night I thought I was in the nave of a vast cathedral, another night I was deep underground hearing chanting that sounded like the earth’s heartbeat.

Then when my sight started to come back I remember seeing snow on Hampstead Heath from my high-up window, but not quite being able to process what it was, why the Heath was white. I remember cold air seeping through the cracks in the windows when I stood by them.

In my novel, I write about a hallucination that Jago, the main character has, which is from one of my hallucinations from early on in hospital. In it, I was in a cottage hospital in Dublin, the sort you get in very small towns or villages, or used to. It was some time in the past. I was on my own in a small dark room. The door was open and outside my room, a group of nurses with lilting Irish accents were sitting round a table with the soft glow of an oil lamp on them, talking very quietly. Murmuring, really. They were making plans to go out together that evening. I felt so looked after, like nothing could possibly hurt me. It was cosy and safe. I’m sure I had that hallucination because in the real world I was being looked after like that.

Then I remember leaving the Royal Free hospital to go to neurological rehabilitation. They wheeled me down to an ambulance and the thing I remember most of all is the air on my face. It was cold and full of the sweet rawness of freshly fallen snow, and it made me feel as I did as a child on a snow day. After the weeks indoors it was a complete renewal.

While I was in rehab, winter started to give way to spring. Bulbs pushed up though the ground in the gardens. One sunny day, I lay on the wall outside, looking up at the sky and feeling the sun on my face for the first time in a long time. The sky was blue without a cloud and I watched the birds slicing through the air above me. In my diary from that day I just wrote: We are going to be all right.

Before coming home for good, I had open heart surgery to fix the problem that caused the cardiac arrest. I woke from that feeling like I had been hit by a lorry. Then I began the long process of getting used to my new life, learning to live with my brain injury.

In those months, or perhaps even in the first year or two, I felt like I was on one side of a glass divide and the rest of the world was on the other. I still feel like that sometimes.

I’m still not quite used to this new life, to not being able to live in the way I lived before. It’s not at all a bad life, but it is very different. There are many things that I can no longer do. But, much more importantly, there are many things I can do. I am alive, I can see, I have my family, and I can write.

At some point during the first year after my cardiac arrest I started to write my novel, This, my second life. I don’t remember deciding to start writing it, or even when I started writing it. My memory is impaired. I do remember a hot day, lying outdoors writing, my novel underway. I kept going, writing small amounts by hand once every two or three days. Usually I would forget what I had written before and would have to go back to look before carrying on.

My novel is based on my experience, and I believe that writing it was my way of coming to terms with what has happened. I also wanted to share this new feeling. Before all this, I found it hard to relax. I was constantly doing something, with my mind always on the next thing. I think many people live like that. With my brain injury, this changed. I found I had an inner calm that wasn’t there before, or at least it wasn’t accessible. As I became more conscious of what I was writing, I wanted it to convey this feeling, to make the reader feel this sense of safety and peace. I hope my novel does do that.

When I finished the novel, I put it in a drawer and didn’t think about it for some time.

I think trying to do anything with it would have been a step too far back into the world. I wasn’t ready for it. My confidence has been knocked by what’s happened. I have experienced just how easily life can end, and the way I think and live has changed completely. Before, I was quick-thinking with a big capacity for work, and the ability to have lots of things going on at once. Now I am slow, forgetful, often exhausted. I am cognitively impaired. My previous life of doing well at work and having a busy home life ended in an instant. It was like a monumental train crash and I think I was numb with shock for a very long time.

In therapy, I was told I needed to mourn my previous life. I didn’t really understand that at the time, but I do now. Then, quite recently, there came a point when I knew I had look to the future.

After the cardiac arrest, I thought a lot about my purpose in life. I have my family, but no job in a world that often defines people by what they do. I knew I couldn’t go back to work, but I also knew that I need more from life than just drifting through. That I have a second chance. A second life. I can’t live it in the way I lived before, but when I was offered a publishing deal for my novel, it felt like being given a new start and I understood that this is what I will do now. I will write.

© Patrick Charnley 2025