I'M SO LUCKY TO BE ALIVE!

IF YOU had told Adam Dodd a year ago that he would get the chance to play at the San Siro, he would have been entitled to think you were crackers

- JOHN LYONS

It was in early June last year that the FC United defender came within a whisker of losing his life. He went to bed as normal, but then had a cardiac arrest in the middle of the night. Fortunately, his girlfriend Kat heard him gasping and was able to perform CPR until an ambulance arrived.

Then a number of shocks with a defibrillator were needed to get his pulse going. He was taken to Blackpool Hospital and put into an induced coma, with his family and friends not knowing if he would wake up or whether he would have brain damage. Thankfully, he lived to tell the tale.

“When the cardiac arrest happened, the paramedic said to my girlfriend that it would be rare to come back from that,” said the 30-year-old.

“For me, it was just a relief to eventually wake up. The surgeon said to me ‘you don’t know how lucky you are to be alive’.”

But Dodd wasn’t out of the woods by any means. He was discharged after three weeks, but was only at home for four days when matters took a turn for the worse.

“I was waking up in the middle of the night and struggling to breathe,” he said. “The pneumonia I had had came back and my body wasn’t responding to the antibiotics I was taking.

Agony

“My right lung fully collapsed and my left one was partially collapsed. It was agony trying to breathe and I thought I was going to die.

“One night I tried to get up to go to the toilet in the hospital. It was only eight yards away but I fell to the floor in agony just trying to catch my breath.”