“Luce wake up! Stop messing around!” She slapped me round the face, threw water over me, anything to try to rouse me… nothing. She realised I had no pulse, oh and that donkey noise? That was my body trying to breathe, which she had realised I was no longer doing either. Panicked she leapt into action, pulling me onto the ground, her decades of nursing experience coursing through her as she grasped what was going on. She was about to give her 24 year old daughter CPR.

My dad and brother arose in all the commotion. Dad came running through stark bollock naked (pretty usual for my family) my mum screamed at him to open the window. My younger brother Henry appeared.

Growing up with a mother who was a nurse, you hear all sorts of stories. From young girls gleefully roller blading into the hospital, jumping up onto a bed and proceeding to take off their prosthetic leg. To tricks the nurses would play on each other, sneaking false patient cards into the box, and watching as their friend called for Seymour Butts or Chris Peacock, only to be met with deafening silence and the subsequent raging embarrassment as they heard the snickering coming from behind them. These stories, they stick with you, and with Henry too. He remembers mum telling us that whenever someone died in a ward the first thing you would do is open the window, to let their soul free.

He walked into my room at just the wrong time. Dad stepping around mum and I on the floor as he reaches up to open the window, things dangling. Henry puts two and two together, his sister out cold on the floor, mother in absolute peril trying to resuscitate me, watching as I foam at the mouth at my mother’s desperate attempt.

The window is open, so her soul must be gone.

I don’t know if he recovered from that moment, but in true Dodd spirit he too leapt into action. Dad had frozen, panicked, overwhelmed by the thought of losing a second child. He couldn’t pick up the phone, he could barely breathe, a naked statue stood solid. Henry grabbed his phone and called 999, I can only imagine the conversation that followed. The fear in his voice, yet so assertive, adrenaline at full capacity. He’s told he’s close to a local defibrillator, he also knows he only has minutes to play with. The sudden fate of his sister, lying in his trembling clammy hands.

Chaos ensued, mum barely taking a breath of her own, giving everything she has to bring the light back to her lifeless daughter. It turns out the debrillator wasn’t as local as they had thought. The ambulance is on the way as well as the first response unit, this is a Cat 1 - a 24 year old close to death for no apparent reason.

It had been nearly 10 minutes. 10 minutes since I last took a breath. 10 minutes since my heart beat on its own. 10 minutes of the world crumbling around us, time standing still, whilst you felt the weight of every second. Helpless.

The first response unit arrived, an air ambulance team who were closest to the scene, to my home. They came bouldering inside, leaping two steps at a time, hurling down the landing and arriving in my childhood bedroom. They had to pry my mother off me, she’d been giving me CPR and mouth to mouth non-stop for nearly 15 minutes. She had seen no response. I was as lifeless as the moment she found me, even the water she’d thrown over me had moved, made its way down my neck into my hair, soaking the collar of my favourite Keith Harring T-shirt. Slowly joined by the foam crawling out of my mouth. But me? Still nothing, no movement at all.

My family cleared out, making room for the paramedics to get to work, paddles out, charged, CLEAR.

Nothing.

Again. CLEAR.

Nothing.

Again. CLEAR

They shocked me 8 times before my heart restarted. All the while, my family trying to hear anything but the sounds of me flatlining in the room next door. They intubate me, controlling my breath with a mere hand pump, every squeeze a promise of my breath that may not return.