‘Mr Con Stamocostas I’d like to inform you that you are having a heart attack.’
These are not the words that you expect to here at 37 but the paramedic wasn’t joking. He was as serious as a heart attack.
It was May 5, 2014. Initially I thought I was having an anxiety attack or it was just a hangover from a massive bender from the night before. But when the sweating, pressure in my chest, heavy breathing and shooting pains in my elbows didn’t go away I knew something was terribly wrong.
After the symptoms had gotten progressively worse I finally called 000 for an ambulance. When the paramedics came to the door, being Greek I invited them into the house, asked them if they wanted anything to eat or drink and enquired what nationality they were.
Unsurprisingly one of the paramedics was taken aback, saying ‘Mate there is no way we are coming in, you are getting in the ambulance so we can check you out!’
When he asked if it was alright to shave my chest so he could do an ECG scan I said, ‘sure, but just keep in mind I never do this on the first date.”
I was using humour to make light of what was happening but I stopped making jokes when tests showed I was having a heart attack. With oxygen flowing into my nose to help with my breathing and a tablet under my tongue to narrow the blood vessels that supply blood to the heart I was driven to hospital.
On the way there I asked one of the paramedics, ‘Am I going to die’? he replied, ‘nah mate, you are going to be fine’.
To me hell was standing still and not doing anything purposeful with my life.
I was lucky that I did go to hospital when I did as the doctors discovered in one of the coronary arterioles that supply blood to the heart they found two blockages.
With one blockage at 97 per cent and the other at 70 per cent the cardiologist performed keyhole surgery and inserted two stents where the obstruction was. If I waited any longer I may have fallen unconscious and gone into cardiac arrest and died within minutes. I am so fortunate that didn’t happen because in Australia, only who suffer a cardiac arrest outside of hospital survive.
Unbelievably I had another near death experience only two weeks later. In a crazy irony, one of the blood thinning medications I was taking due to my heart attack caused me to suffer internal bleeding. I lost so much blood I had to have four blood transfusions and I ended up in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for a few days before I was stable again.
After my second near death experience in two weeks I was sick to death of almost dying.
Soon after recovering I attempted to change my life around and was on a massive high that made me appreciate every moment. I become one of those people that looked at the clouds in wonder. I chatted to people saying ‘how about those clouds? Do you see dragons and horses like I do’?
After I completed a master’s degree in journalism I started to earn a living writing for Next Media and Neos Kosmos. My journalism major project which was a on Indigenous football was shown on NITV.
The highlight was a trip to Los Angeles where I secured an NBA media pass and interviewed LA Lakers in the players locker room. I also got married – all these achievements felt out of my reach when I was on the operating table because at that point I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it.
But after a couple of years I started to take life for granted. The clouds didn’t seem so amazing. I also started experiencing this melancholic feeling of ‘oh my god, we are all going to die’. It would strike me at different times of the day and while the feeling eventually passed it was causing me existential angst.
Author Con Stamocostas court side at an NBA game. Source: Supplied
I asked my wife why she didn’t obsess over death and she replied, ‘because unlike you, I didn’t almost die twice.’ It did make sense but didn’t alleviate my worry.
Every experience you have in life is an opportunity, if you are open to it.
However, my perspective on death changed dramatically when on a recent work assignment, I met Dr. Vasilis Adrahtas.
Dr Adrahtas is a theologian and historian. He is a visiting fellow at University of NSW, teaching Ancient Greek religion and myth.
I thought he was the perfect person to ask what happens when you die.
“I don’t believe that heaven is up there,” he said.
What? How can someone who teaches theology not believe in heaven?
“The afterlife is this life,” he replied. “What we call afterlife is the picking up of that experience that you lived once or twice or several times while you were alive and you take it to the next level.
“If people don’t manage, don’t achieve, don’t experience this otherness in their everyday material condition, there is no chance they will experience an afterlife. It’s the goodness, the love, the truth. That is what will be there when you die. Let’s say that experience, that moment, that’s our eternity. Look at it like those experiences together make up your surfboard that you will ride through the ocean of eternity.”
Let’s take a pause. No we aren’t on drugs, there were no joints being passed, no pills being popped, no acid being hit. We were two sober adults in an inner west Sydney café drinking skim milk cappuccinos.
But I must admit that hearing Dr Adrahtas speak was like being on a drug free acid trip. Before my heart attack I was unemployed and avoided friends and family and I was single for many years. I became a hermit. So when Dr Adrahtas says the afterlife is this life I get what he means. To me hell was standing still and not doing anything purposeful with my life. I was closing myself off from experiences and missing out on the goodness, the love and the truth.
What I took away from that conversation with Dr Adrahtas is that every experience you have in life is an opportunity, if you are open to it, to build on your afterlife experience. That by achieving your dreams, ambitions and cherishing your relationships and being the best version of yourself that when you die you won’t experience nothingness.
I still fear death, being human means it’s unavoidable. But after leaving that interview with Dr Adrahtas I stopped freaking out about it. I figured it’s better to think that when you die there isn’t just darkness forever but that your experiences during your life could be your surfboard through the ocean of eternity.
Now I’m one of those people that looks up at the clouds with wonder and says surf’s up!
Con Stamocostas is a freelance writer. You can follow him on
