I was loving life and cycling when I went out for a ride early in the morning of 21 June 2025. The hottest day of the year, apparently.
I had a cardiac arrest on a challenging climb near Brands Hatch, which I must have cycled a hundred times. It’s a quiet country lane with not much traffic on, particularly at 7.30 in the morning.
Thank goodness I was found by Richard and Emma, who were on their way to the circuit where Richard was volunteering as a race marshal. Richard and Emma realised that the issue was with my heart and gave me CPR for 23 minutes until a Critical Care Paramedic (CCP) from South East Coast Ambulance Service (SECAmb) arrived by car. He was followed by another CCP, a land ambulance and then the team from Air Ambulance Charity Kent Surrey Sussex (KSS), who landed nearby.
KSS took me to the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, where I had a stent fitted within a very short time. I was in sedation for two and a half weeks. I’ve been told there were several times when it didn’t look very good for me as there was virtually no brain activity. My family was told to expect the worst a couple of times but then I woke up and five weeks later I walked out of hospital.
On 24 August I met Emma and Richard and that was the first time anybody could give me any kind of information about what had happened. I saw photographs showing the road closed so that people could help me.
It’s just unbelievable that Emma and Richard gave me 23 minutes of CPR and didn’t give up. If they’d stopped at any time, that would have been it.
Richard
“I was driving up the hill, coming around a blind corner. Emma yelled at me to stop because she’d seen a cyclist on the road, but I was already on the brakes, bringing the car to a stop. Our initial thought was that Craig might have fallen and hit his head, but he had no head injury.
“Within a few seconds Emma called out that he wasn’t breathing and there was no heartbeat. Through my training as a race marshal and as a workplace first aider, I knew we had to call 999 and start CPR.”
Emma
“We would get exhausted then swap again. Part of the difficulty was trying to catch your breath each time to be able to tell the call handler we were still going. During the 23 minutes there was nothing that was going to make us stop.
“Once the paramedics had taken over, I went to Craig’s head and helped give him oxygen. Then, after two shocks from the defibrillator, they got his heart beating.”
Allan McHenry, HEMS Paramedic with KSS
“Thanks to our colleagues from SECAmb we had a very good clinical picture of how Craig was. It was apparent to us that we needed to anaesthetise him in order to give him the best possible care.
“It allowed us to maximise the oxygen he was getting which helped to preserve his brain. The sooner we begin doing that for a patient, the better.
“Once we were satisfied that his heart was the issue, we agreed William Harvey Hospital was the best place for him. We also asked the ambulance crew to send the ECG directly to the cardiologists at the William Harvey Hospital, meaning the hospital team knew exactly what the problem was and could do what they needed to. It all makes that chain of survival a little bit shorter.
“The reality is that if Richard and Emma had not done anything, Craig would not be here.”
Craig continues:
It has a huge impact on me to hear what Richard and Emma did for me. I never thought I was a candidate for this type of thing. To hear how determined they were is amazing. 23 minutes is a long time for them to give CPR, but with their help I beat the statistics. The chances of surviving an out of hospital cardiac arrest are slim and I couldn’t have done it if these guys hadn’t been there and come across to help me.
I’m a big advocate for CPR and raising awareness of how important it is. Bystander CPR saved me.
To learn more about CPR visit our Restart a Heart page.
