Richard Bacon has said doctors expected him to die after he was hospitalised with a lung infection earlier this year.
The former ‘Blue Peter’ presenter spent 12 days in intensive care and was put in a medically-induced coma following a plane journey in July.
Now speaking about just how critical his condition was, Richard told ‘Good Morning Britain’ viewers doctors were anticipating his death.
“I was very, very close to death,” he told hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid.
“They went from telling me I needed to be in an induced coma to being in a coma in four minutes. They said to me afterwards, ‘It wasn’t that you might die, we expected you to die.’ I was the illest person in Lewisham hospital.”
Revealing the devastating impact the incident had on his wife Rebecca, he continued: “There was one point where they had the crash equipment hovering over me, my body turned blue, there was a moment when they believed I was going to die. She’d been given that impression.
“I find out afterwards and it’s sort of a story, but for her it was a phone by the bed, waiting every second waiting for that call to come in that her husband had died.”
Describing how he came to have the infection, Richard added: “It was bad luck - I breathed something in. The working theory, they never really worked out what it was exactly, is that I got on the plane at the wrong time and the pressurised cabin caused this infection in both of my lungs to explode everywhere.”
Richard said it could take him six months to recover fully and also praised the NHS for saving his life.
“In 2012 Jeremy Hunt tried to close [University Hospital Lewisham] down. The lead consultant said to me, ‘If they had succeeded in closing that down, the next A&E would have been too far away and you would have died’,” Richard explained.
“If you think about the problems that south London has at the moment with violence, the idea that they should have one less hospital, it’s obviously ridiculous.”
‘Good Morning Britain’ airs weekdays at 6am on ITV.
