'Five minutes after selfie with mates I was dying'

Fitness instructor Grant Williams, 54, was training with friends a marathon when they paused for their customary selfie.

Within minutes, he had collapsed on Smithdown Road in Liverpool and suffered two cardiac arrests.

A doctor cycling home from her nightshift at Alder Hey Children's Hospital stopped to attempt to resuscitate him, while his friends rushed to a nearby Tesco to grab a defibrillator which the shop kept for customer emergencies.

A second doctor having his hair cut nearby was told what was happening and joined the effort to save him.

Grant has no recollection of being taken ill, or the eight minutes he was without a heartbeat.

"The next thing I knew, I was coming round in hospital," he said.

"I didn't even know what happened. There was there was no pain. I had no vision. I had no hearing.

"You're just waking up with people around you."

On the road to recovery he had two goals, one of which was to find the two off duty medics who treated him.

Thanks to BBC Breakfast he was reunited with Dr Mel Hamilton and Dr Joe Clarkson.

His second goal raise money for the unit where he had a quadruple heart bypass operation.

"My surgeon was amazing. He told me exactly what he was going to do, and the heart and chest hospital was just the best hospital, from the cleaners onwards," he said.

On Monday, he celebrated two years since the incident, and although rehabilitation was hard physically and mentally, his thoughts were with his friends who witnessed his near-death experience.

"They had it worse than me, because it's still stuck in their head... seeing me, seeing me dead on the floor, and people working on me.

"It's them I feel sorry for, really."

Williams is back running and has completed marathons in his home town Newport and in Manchester, and on Sunday he will do his first run in his adopted city Liverpool, where he has lived for 30 years.

"It'll mean loads because there's a lot of people coming out running who've never finished a half before... so it'll be a big achievement for them, and I'll be happy to finish it," he said.

He added that last Monday marked the two-year anniversary of his collapse.

"So that's why this week we've had the big fundraising week," he added.

He said he never avoided Smithdown Road, and that despite what happened to him, he got a good feeling when he thought of the way he was helped by strangers.

"There were people telling me afterwards that there's a lot of shops nearby and there was people coming out giving me coats, putting coats over me, coats underneath me, asking how I was.

"I always look at where it happened and it just showed the community spirit of Liverpool as a whole," he said.

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