Michael Harding on how a heart attack changed his life – for the better

It’s a common occurrence for those who have come through cardiac surgery or a heart attack to subsequently suffer the blues, having had a brush with their own mortality – but for Michael Harding, it sort of happened the other way around.

The prolific writer and broadcaster had been going through a period of melancholy of sorts in the period before his dramatic attack nine months ago.

“I was having a strange time; it wasn’t depression – more a kind of down. I felt my body knew that trouble was coming,” he says.

He’d gone into himself; he’d stopped writing his hugely popular Irish Times column for the first time in 13 years. He’d spent two months in solitude in Poland, trying to write a book – and came home without writing a line.

That was an extraordinary fallow period for a man with three best-selling memoirs, three novels and a plethora of plays to his name – not to mention his weekly column and regular media appearances.

And then his world turned on its head just after 9am on the morning of Saturday, December 8 last, when he got pains in his chest ahead of a reading and performance he was giving in Blanchardstown.

“I was lucky when I had the heart attack, in a sense – lucky because I was in a hotel in Blanchardstown, across from the hospital and I had a paramedic team with me in eight or nine minutes,” he said.

“Another hour or so, and I wouldn’t be here now.”

He was rushed in for surgery, had a stent inserted in an artery that was 90 per cent blocked – and discovered miraculously that there was really no lasting damage done.

Even better, the unblocking of his artery also removed his writer’s block – culminating in his new book, Chest Pains, which will be launched in Galway at an Evening with Michael Harding in the Meyrick Hotel on Friday week at 7pm.

Tickets, at €22, include a copy of the book; they’re available in advance from Easons.com

Read the full interview in this week’s Connacht Tribune.