‘Take off all your clothes apart from your underwear and put these on. I will be back shortly to collect you'… It’s not every day you get a proposition like that!

Five minutes later Dale came back to collect me. I follow closely behind him, like a nervous school child on their first day in a new school.

We arrive at a pair of rubber swing doors; Dale reaches forward to push them open. Wow! It felt like we had just entered the set of the TV drama Casualty.

But this was no TV drama, this was the real deal! A real cardiac operating theatre with lights blazing to illuminate the cast of 10 clinical professionals. With the main character, the patient, lying lifelessly on the operating table, centre stage.

This was not the first time I had been here. Seven months earlier Dale, my guide for the day, was the anaesthetist who put me to sleep while I underwent my own major heart surgery.

Post-procedure I suffered significant emotional turmoil so this visit was to observe a patient on a similar journey in hope it would help me acquire closure to my trauma. After observing more than a dozen procedures and interviewing world-class clinicians and patients, I wrote a book I hoped would help fellow patients on their cardiac journey.

Whilst observing the procedure, Dale pointed out the screens showing the rise and fall of the patients’ heartbeat. Eureka! I thought. That’s what real life is all about. A series of highs and lows.

Some sixty-seven years earlier a man was pacing up and down a corridor. He was chain-smoking and had been doing so for more than five hours.

He watched as a staff member entered the cubicle she had been particularly interested in. Suddenly, she reappeared and called out ‘Mr Hillman’. The man rushed over and was greeted with the words ‘congratulations you have an eight-pound, eleven-ounce baby boy. That man was my dad, the baby boy was me. My journey on the thing we call life had just begun.

It’s only when ‘life’ gives you a reason to review it, that we realise how extraordinary our ordinary lives have been.

Like most of us, I haven’t played lead guitar in front of 250,000 adoring fans. I haven’t scored the winning goal in the last minute of a World Cup Final, nor have I created a Facebook, Apple or Microsoft dynasty. However, like the heartbeat monitor in theatre, I have had what I would consider many highs in my life. I have also experienced the deep, dark valleys we all find ourselves in at some stage of life’s journey.

As Marcus Aurelius the Roman Emperor and philosopher once said:

‘We should not fear death…..what we should fear is not having lived.’