Geelong’s Lara MP John Eren tells all: `I was dead for three minutes’

Victorian Sport Minister John Eren says there’s nothing like dying to bring you back down to earth with a thud.

He’s been there, dead for three minutes.

Perhaps all that brought him back was that his heart stopped in the waiting room at Geelong Hospital.

“I didn’t see it, I was dead,” he said of his dramatic resuscitation. Mr Eren, 52, collapsed after having experienced acute chest pain which prompted him to cut short a family Father’s Day trip to Melbourne.

“It was a bit excruciating, it was like a samurai warrior with a sword trying to get out of your chest and an elephant sitting on it preventing him,” he said. He had felt guilty going straight to the window in the busy emergency waiting room but felt life literally slipping away as he awaited assessment.

“It just felt so scary, you feel so vulnerable, you feel exposed,” Mr Eren said. “You feel like you’re a bystander and that you can’t do anything even though you know that there’s this struggle of life and death going on within you. And your reinforcements are the nurses and the doctors and the medications that you get to make you survive through this.”

A scan showed one of Mr Eren’s artereies was about 90% blocked.