Martin Roberts has said he was moments away from death after being rushed to hospital with chest pains last month.
The Homes Under The Hammer presenter’s organs started to fail after a sack around his heart filled with fluid, meaning it could not pump properly.
During Wednesday’s This Morning, Martin discussed his recent health scare, and explained he had been feeling “under the weather for a couple of weeks” before being taken to hospital, initially believing he might have been suffering with long Covid.
“I’ve had a few chest infections over the last few years and I’ve had asthma since childhood, so I’m used to quite a tight chest,” he told hosts Phillip Schofield and Rochelle Humes. “As it approached the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, it was starting to get really bad where I could hardly walk without struggling for breath.
“It looked like it could have been the symptoms for long Covid – real lethargy, a tightness in the chest, pain in the chest, difficulty breathing, so you pause it and pause it and by the time it got to just after the Bank Holiday weekend, I was starting to be delirious, putting letters the wrong way round, I said to Kirsty [his wife], ‘We’ve got to go to hospital.’”
Martin continued: “There’s a sack around your heart and it was filling with fluid, it’s called a pericardial effusion and that in turn is something called a tapenade, which basically means this sack is squeezing the heart it sits around, so the heart isn’t able to expand, and therefore isn’t able to pump, so it means all of your organs start failing.
“By the time they got to me, my kidneys were at 30 per cent, my liver was at 30 per cent, my lungs weren’t getting the oxygen and at any point, I could have had a heart attack... The heart would have been strangled by itself.”
He added: “We’re talking minutes stroke hours of life left here.”
Martin said he then had a “dark red/black liquid” drained from his chest under a local anaesthetic.
His wife Kirsty described his health scare as a “watershed moment” for them both to readjust their pace of life.
But Martin added he will start filming Homes Under the Hammer again in a few weeks.
“I’ve got to get to 20 years,” he said. “Hopefully I’ll get some nicer properties and they’ll cherry pick the good ones, rather than the really bad ones.”
This Morning airs weekdays at 10am on ITV.