"David played a sort of charity football match. All of a sudden he collapsed and people thought it was a joke but after one or two minutes they realised it was serious," said Gilles Dreyfus, professor of cardiac surgery at the Monaco Heart Centre. "Fortunately there was one person who had been trained in CPR, because otherwise he would have been brain dead. They then called the emergency services, who arrived eight minutes later with him in cardiac arrest. "I was speaking to the captain and he was telling me the girl who was in the ambulance only knew where the football field, which isn't an official one but a private one, was because she had seen it that morning and asked somebody what it was. "If she hadn't then most likely she would not have found it within the timeframe to save him. "They arrived with him in cardiac arrest, he was shocked four times on site, they were able to restore a normal heart rhythm and within 10 minutes a helicopter arrived to transfer him to Monaco Heart Centre. "I made the decision to transfer him to the operating theatre and he immediately underwent a quadruple heart bypass, which was very straightforward although difficult. "This morning he woke up perfectly normally with no neurological damage and is now recovering from a bypass like anybody would normally do. "It was a sequence of events that at every stage went absolutely fine, that is why he is here today. Luckier you can't be. It's an unbelievable story."
Thanks for that 83, quite an extraordinary sequence of events, it obviously wasn't his time to go yet.
He was very lucky, my dad died last year from a similar heart attack, he was very fit and healthy, he had had an ECG just a week before for something unrelated and it was normal. I hope he makes a good recovery, I met him once and he was a nice guy.
He certainly was. My father in law died at 58 from a heart attack during the night. Went to bed, massive coronary and didn`t wake up. No ill health, no warning, nothing. This bloke went down in a heap, they got to him in time, kick started his ticker, carted him off and did a quad bypass. That is a hell of a lot of luck. From the little I`ve seen of him he seemed like a decent chap. Not your poncy prima donna superstar type.
