Celebrity hairdresser Michael Douglas has opened up about the time he died for two minutes and 47 seconds on an operating table after an anaesthetist wrongly injected morphine into his ‘spinal cord’
A famed hair stylist to the stars had a brush with death on the operating table.
Michael Douglas, 51, was dramatically “brought back to life” after an anaesthetist mistakenly injected morphine into his “spinal cord”, causing his brain to “numb” during a procedure to treat his recurring lung collapse condition.
Michael’s lungs had “spontaneously” collapsed “12 times in total” landing him in hospital “for a couple of weeks” each time to have them “re-inflated”. This was due to the air he inhaled causing a tear and subsequently “puncturing” one of his lungs.
His condition was deemed “life-threatening”, as if both lungs collapsed, or if the left one fell “hard” enough to compress his heart, it could prove fatal.
At the age of 20, he underwent an “extremely painful” and complex operation to “glue” his lungs “up inside” his body.
During this procedure, the anaesthetist administered the first epidural to numb his chest, as tubes needed to be “pulled in and out on a daily basis” to allow space for the lung to re-expand.
However, the second epidural was erroneously injected into Michael’s “spinal cord”, leading to a terrifying two minutes and 47 seconds where he was technically dead. The misplaced “morphine” had “numbed” his brain, causing his heart to stop and all his organs to fail.
Michael, who is romantically linked with telly host Davina McCall, 57, shared a harrowing tale on the latest episode of the How to Cut It in the Hairdressing Industry podcast: “[Aged] 20 I had these operations. And I’d been in hospital for about 18 months, pretty much on and off at this point. And then they did the right side, and that worked.
“It’s an extremely painful operation. And they gave you an epidural, which is what they give to pregnant women, and with the epidural, they can numb different parts of your body.
“So they said, ‘We’re going to numb your chest with this epidural because these tubes have got to be pulled in and out on a daily basis to give you room for the lung to come back up.'”.
“Anyway, the second epidural I had went wrong, and then I died on the operating table.
“Then I was resuscitated, and brought back to life. I died for two minutes, 47 seconds, they said.
“So when I woke up eventually, I was in intensive care. I was vomiting all these tubes out of my mouth and stuff like that, but I was paralysed essentially. I couldn’t move my body because my brain had been filled with morphine, because that’s what happened.
“The epidural needle went into my spinal cord. All the morphine went straight up to my brain. All my organs failed, and my heart stopped because the brain essentially just got numbed, but it stopped doing anything.
“So it stopped keeping me alive essentially.”
After the “morphine” had left Michael’s system and he “came back to life”, there were concerns from the medical team that he might never fully recover.
Michael shared: “So anyway, I had to wait for all this morphine to drain from my system, just about a week or so, and then slowly my body came back to life.
“I started to move my arms and legs again and stuff like that, but they didn’t really know whether I’d ever walk again or anything.”
Upon regaining consciousness, he was greeted by a nurse who asked him if he knew his whereabouts, to which he responded, ‘Not really. ‘”She then informed him: “‘I’m going to get someone to come and talk to you.
And the anaesthetist came over and he said, ‘Do you have any idea what happened to you?
“To which he replied, ‘No.'”.
The anaesthetist then revealed: “And he said, ‘OK, I’m going to tell you. I made a mistake and put the needle in the wrong place, and we killed you, and then we brought you back to life.”
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
