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I don’t often think about the fact that I nearly died — but I did.
When someone suffers a cardiac arrest, their heart stops. And when our heart stops, we stop.
Generally, because our bodies require blood flow around the body to keep us alive, without the heart beating, there is no coming back from that.
Waking up in hospital and seeing my news story covered on every major TV channel as well as in the digital media, I knew I could use my profile to leverage awareness for something that I knew nothing about.
That was my catalyst for founding Heart of the Nation, a charitable initiative to raise awareness about sudden cardiac arrest and the simple steps we can take to save lives.
A real show stopper
For me, it began like any other day — a trip to the gym in the morning, then a trip to the hardware store to get the bits and pieces that I needed to fix a leaking toilet.
After lunch, I headed off to a gig — the original Wiggles line-up had gotten together to play a show at Castle Hill RSL Club to raise funds for the Red Cross and the Wildlife Information Rescue and Education Service.
We were helping these groups assist those who had been affected by the .
I left home and said goodbye to my loved ones, taking for granted that I would return home as I did on any other day.
After all, I was going to do something I had done thousands of times before, with no concern for my health or safety.
The show began like any other.
Singing and dancing for 80 minutes with not many breaks is always a physical challenge, but it’s a challenge I enjoy.
This time, however, all the moving around caused a little piece of plaque inside one of my coronary arteries to break off.
This caused the blood to clot around it, which blocked off my left anterior descending artery — one of the main arteries in my heart.
This is what’s known as a “widow maker” heart attack.
A feeling of surrender
The blockage of this particular artery is something that not many people survive because it feeds a large part of the heart muscle — and without blood being supplied to that much of the heart muscle, it causes the heart’s electrical system to freak out.
Without the electrical impulses telling the muscle what to do, it doesn’t know how to beat — and the heart ends up in cardiac arrest.
That’s exactly what happened to me. There had been no warning, no symptoms — nothing.
— a familiar feeling, usually when we were performing in a hot space or if we’d done multiple shows in a day.
But never before had this happened.
As I lay on the floor, feeling exhausted, a feeling came over me; a feeling of such complete exhaustion and giving up — a surrender.
Yes, I felt a little uncomfortable as I struggled to breathe — but I didn’t know at the time that my heart had stopped.
Feeling exhausted after long performances was something familiar to Greg Page, but his fatigue after a show in January 2020 was a sign of something far more dangerous. Source: Getty / Vallery Jean/FilmMagic
The importance of CPR and AED
It was only after waking up in hospital that I learned that I had been resuscitated by people around me who knew cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Without their presence, I wouldn’t be alive today.
Without the RSL Club having an automated external defibrillator (AED) available, I almost certainly can say that I wouldn’t be alive.
It is the AED that restarted my heart when it was used by my ‘angels’ who were by my side to save my life that night.
The moment that my heart stopped is something that I don’t think about often.
Nothing flashed before my eyes, there was no light, no tunnel, no family members or God-like beings sending me back.
Just a calm feeling of surrender to something that I couldn’t control. A peaceful feeling as I blacked out — no panic, no fear, no worry or concern for anything. Just a knowing that all was okay.
Even though, in a physical sense, it wasn’t.
It was when I woke up in hospital and was told of what happened that it really hit me just how ‘lucky’ I had been, and still am, to be alive.
This is why I do what I do today, with Heart of the Nation — to raise awareness about the fact that we CAN do something to bring people back when their heart stops.
Training more people to perform CPR and making sure they have access to AEDs when needed will save many lives.
There is a window of time when we, as general members of the public, can do something to help reunite a cardiac arrest patient with their loved ones on this side of life, not the other side.
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