DEATH felled him hard. Heavy. Fast.

No room to think, to upend time or scream for help. Nothing in slow motion.

That damn giddiness was his red flag. When it struck he didn’t understand why. He’d been searching for the motocross start line, where his second son – the young man who shadowed his dear dad as a small boy of two – was revving his bike.

“Not this!” It’s all that’s left to him. It’s all he can recall saying, so quietly that no one else would hear (it might not have made it past his lips) as his world tilted and his mind searched in that slither of a moment for an anchor.

He didn’t realise this annoying sense of being a bit off-colour, again, signalled his life might be over.

Richard Borella’s clinical death was instantaneous. Silent. Cut clean from life in a brutal blow at odds with the mess of its cause. And then his new life began where medical logic had it that it really shouldn’t. One of his saviours dubbed it a one percenter. Not in hospital. No defibrillator. No real hope.

But within seconds of his collapse, two off-duty intensive care nurses began cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Then a doctor, then an on-duty first aider. Five, six souls in the crowd at this first round of racing on a farm eight kilometres out of Mansfield.

They were so close they saved his life. An infinite randomness, of extraordinary luck. It was Sunday, April 26, 2015, around noon. Not so long after he marched in Albury for Anzac Day.

Someone saw Ash leap from his bike, tossing his helmet behind as he raced to his father’s side. Deeply distraught. His mum, Pam, still sees his haunted face that night at Melbourne’s The Alfred hospital.

Twenty-five minutes of relentless CPR. Ribs cracking. Two-minute stints before exhaustion and aching limbs demanded they swap, on a constant rotation. He remained lost to them, even with sporadic flutters of a pulse.

But they kept his blood pumping, his body saturated with oxygen, so the paramedics’ arrival with a defibrillator could offer genuine hope.

Though no one truly knew.

The lower chambers of his heart had begun to tread water. It caused him to lose his feet track-side, a couple of hundred kilometres from where his wife and daughters got ready at their Lavington home early that morning for a pony club meet.

For an eternity, that afternoon, they thought he was more likely dead than alive.

His heart quivered like jelly yet so rapid and spasmodic as to wallow in a blubbering mess. Going “at a million miles an hour”. It couldn’t pump blood. After a few minutes, starved of oxygen, his organs would have begun shutting down. He woke in hospital the next day to the strange sight of a belly swollen by his struggling kidneys.

Even if revived, there was a strong chance of brain damage. But for now he was gone.

IT was a lonely end that passed without terror, or a parade of recollections, love and regret. “It just came over me.”

Richard Borella’s death in that moment came a few weeks after a 1000-kilometre trek across the Northern Territory in honour of his grandfather, the Victoria Cross recipient Albert Borella.

He had trimmed his big, strong cabinetmaker’s frame by eight kilograms in readiness for the epic event that retraced on foot, on horseback, by horse and cart and train the journey taken by Albert to Darwin in 1915 to enlist in World War I.

Richard was 47 and feeling fit. Then his heart failed. It came without pain, not choked by a suffocating, vice-like grip across his chest and left shoulder.

He had suffered a ventricular fibrillation, a sudden, chaotic cardiac arrest. Not a heart attack. Overwhelmingly, far more deadly. To many it is known simply as “sudden death”.

Much later, just short of a couple of weeks into his 25-day hospital stint, the doctors found he had blockages in his left and right coronary arteries. At 40 per cent a piece. The turmoil in his heart was so violent that one ruptured. It was left totally clogged.

“I don’t remember falling. The last thing I can recall is walking up to my oldest son, Josh, who is in a wheelchair. He was near the start line with a couple of other friends.”

Richard had not long finished his own race, his first ride in eight years, in the non-competitive class for old stagers who “still go pretty hard”. He’d pushed himself but it was OK. “I didn’t get overtaken by too many guys.” He was especially pleased he made ground on his good friend Andrew Houlihan, closing to 20 metres by the finish line.

Richard parked his bike and grabbed a bottle of water. It was getting cold so he put on a vest. The track was in a beautiful setting and he was happy the grass had cut-up enough to give his tyres grip in the damp, cold ground.

But he no longer felt so flash.

Andrew’s first thought as he got off his bike was to go and say g’day. The pair became the closest of mates as neighbours 35 years ago. He went to get a coffee. Then for no particular reason Andrew turned “and he’d just hit the ground”. The sight of the milling crowd, silenced and jolted with disbelief, told him it had to be a heart attack. “I straight away went and grabbed his handicapped son Josh, to keep him away from the scene.”

Racing stopped. Everyone stood back “and let the medics do their job”. And then Andrew took on something so horribly difficult; phoning the news to Pam and the girls.

“One time Richard had passed and I just didn’t convey that message. I said they were still working on him.” A second call, 45 minutes later, was also grim. By the third, another 30 minutes beyond, he could say there was a pulse.

HE pushes his fingers gently into his chest, at the lower part of his rib cage, to pinpoint the terrible discomfort.

Seven ribs were cracked, his sternum broken, pounded then split during the resuscitation. Days later his torso was black with bruising, a swathe of ink. It was some time before his rib cage could be safely wired-up in surgery. Only then did he start to feel comfortable.

That Monday morning he was “drugged-up” at The Alfred. “But you do wake up a bit. That’s the emotional part.” He stirred around noon, 24 hours after his collapse.

Richard didn’t know what had happened. It was a hospital, but where and why escaped him. He reckoned he must have come off his bike in a race, but he just couldn’t tell.

No insight about his heart (for months he’d dismissed the vague symptoms, reasoning he was too young) or memory of an emergency helicopter flight to Melbourne.

“It hit me pretty hard then to think ‘shit, where am I, what happened, where’s everybody else? Where’s the family, where’s the boys?’.”

Then there was the pain of being intubated. “It was killing me” when the paramedics inserted the tube. It felt too deep, “right down at my lungs. I could feel where it was digging in, it felt like it was making me bleed in there”.

It was a distressing sight for his family – Pam, sons Josh and Ash, now 25 and 23, and daughters Melissa and Tearne, now 21 and 16. They got up that Monday morning in Melbourne not even knowing if he was alive.

Ash though took it as a good sign that there had been no phone calls when they finally went to bed at 1.30am, for a restless sleep, at the Carrum Downs home of Pam’s parents on the other side of Melbourne.

After they arrived at hospital the previous night, a doctor told them, seated around a table, that Richard might have another arrest. The odds were 50-50. Everyone was shocked and upset. Pam felt it most keenly for Ash.

“He’d actually seen every little detail. I’d seen Ashley upset before but he was pretty anxious about it all. He was really, really bad. Ashley and Rich have always been close.”

Thirteen months on, Ash looks down, holding one arm at the elbow, as he looks back to that day their lives so drastically changed. He and Richard are seated in a small upstairs office at the family business, in a North Albury industrial estate. The truck’s waiting outside with another kitchen to fit-out.

Ash took over when his dad went into hospital and it’s only recently that Richard has been able to get close to his pre-collapse workload. Still not as fit, but he easily climbs the narrow staircase two steps at a time.

He has had one artery bypassed in open-heart surgery – five days before he returned home – though it’s a waiting game for the other. It might get a stent, it too might be bypassed. That decision has not yet been made.

Richard occasionally defers to Ash, with a smile, when he can’t remember – and his son corrects him or fills in the gaps of their family tragedy, with a matter-of-fact directness.

Ash watched a couple of people rush past as he waited on the motocross starting line. He had no possible idea it was about his father, especially given the numbers at the track.

Yet somehow he did. He sensed the worst.

“There was just a little bit of a feeling you get. I pulled back, went around and saw him,” he says. The first person he recognised was Dr Daniela Friday, a Mansfield GP on whose family farm the races were being held. She was kneeling by his side.

“It was a fairly dull feeling to see the old man lying on the ground. When she started CPR you could tell it was pretty serious straight away.”

THE portable toilets were running short of water. She was hungry. And her boy was racing, so she was happy to be “a good mum” and watch for a short while.

Dr Daniela Friday doesn’t like motorbikes. She could do without being stuck in the ear-splitting, swarming buzz as it relentlessly chops back and forth. She could do without the risks.

But there were jobs she had to do, by the remotest of chances not long before Richard Borella’s terrible fate was to land. For one, she had to help with the toilets – her husband came up from a paddock to get some water.

“I think I’d got some lunch, a hamburger. My husband actually saw him collapse, he was right behind him,” she says. The first thought was that this man, who Dr Friday didn’t know, was “just mucking around”.

“But then when he came back up to see me he said ‘no, I think this is pretty bad’.” Dr Friday was 10 metres away and by the time she got to him, an ICU nurse was already talking to and shaking Richard. She knew he had no pulse as his complexion was grey.

“We started CPR straight away.” He remained unconscious and they gave him adrenalin when they detected a heart beat. She didn’t think he’d survive, then was buoyed when she heard he had talked in the ambulance.

(It’s something he too recalls, out of the delirium and drifting consciousness. “I remember the ambo guys going ‘Richard, Richard!’. They were actually intubating me at that stage as someone had already revived me.”)

The group’s professional instincts overcame the distress and seriousness of Richard’s predicament. But Dr Friday held scant hope.

“Once someone arrests it’s generally bad. You’re lucky if you come out of it and it’s very unlikely. With out-of-hospital arrests, only 1 per cent of people come out of it functioning.”

On-duty first-aider Greg Johnson, like Dr Friday, had done it before. A few years ago he tried to save the life of his boss, a controller with the SES where Greg did road accident and rescue work for 25 years.

He got to him quickly and helped squeeze out a pulse four times. When the man’s pupils reacted to light, it forged a memory “I’ll never forget”. “But we couldn’t sustain him. It’s going to sound terrible, but that’s the norm.”

That’s why he’s still gob-smacked that Richard survived and is doing so well. When he rang Pam on the Monday, “it knocked the hell out of me” when she handed the phone to Richard.

Dr Friday’s presence gave the team confidence. And she barely flinched when a rib broke. “I saw the look on her face. There was a hesitation for a second and then she kept on going.” She laughs when she points out how amazing that was given she is so much smaller than Richard.

IF he was dead, Pam Borella didn’t know where she could go. She was distraught but utterly lost. 

Pam and the girls were at the pony club when she saw a missed call on her mobile from an unknown number. As had Melissa. Her phone rang again, but again she missed the call. It was only when the mother of Mel’s boyfriend called that they got a step closer to the terrible reality.

She told them Andrew was trying to get in touch. “She hung up and I rang Andrew. It’s not a phone call you really, really expect or want. At that stage Richie was clinically dead.”

The news “sent me to the floor”. He still didn’t have a pulse and wasn’t responding. Mel asked what was wrong, then Tearne overheard the explanation. The girls wept.

If he was indeed gone, Pam felt she had to stay with the girls but also work out where to meet Josh and Ash – home in Albury or down at Mansfield. If Richard was alive and so in an ambulance, it was Melbourne.

“It was surreal because seeing him the day before he was healthy. The worst thing about it was not knowing what to do. And I knew that if he didn’t have a pulse for long then what’s going to be the outcome?”

Pam and the girls’ long drive went quickly, congested with a plethora of phone calls updating family. Richard’s parents were overseas and so couldn’t be contacted.

And the dogs added a touch of the bizarre. “They came with us. We had five dogs and three people in that little Suzuki. The dogs were jumping about like Mad Hatters.” The horses were safely secured back in Albury.

Richard eventually recovered at home, for six months. It was “a horribly long time”, Pam says, because he couldn’t do anything. No strength, able to only potter about. The ups and downs with Josh – “we kind of knew a little bit because Josh had lung problems and kidney problems” – gave them the perspective to cope.

“And it’s still up in the air with Rich until the doctors work it out because they just don’t know why it happened.”

THREE months after his collapse, Richard went back to Mansfield. It was round three.

He knows he cannot dwell on his survival, it’s too complex to process. But if he tries, the emotions return.

“You think about the amount of people who were affected that day. It wasn’t just me and my family.”

So much continues. The love of family – Andrew speaks of Richard and Pam’s utter devotion to the kids, of the unquestioned sacrifices made for Josh – of course won’t change. He might though back-off a bit on work, might take in a bit more of Australia.

His love of beer but especially sugar has taken a hit. And it was enough for Richard’s teetotal, non-smoking older brother, Ross, to get himself checked out. His arteries were 90 per cent blocked so within six weeks he had a double bypass in Melbourne. Five years earlier he’d been given the all clear.

A family history? Richard smiles again. “There is now.” His dad had a triple bypass but was in his mid-60s, not a young man like himself.

Rowan Borella lived on a bit of a hill. He loved his lawns pristine, so paced behind the mower every week. “Religiously. He was one of those blokes who didn’t like the grass to grow.” But it got to the point he struggled to push the mower up that hill. He’d have to stop halfway.

“I can remember getting to a stage and going ‘arrgh, it can’t be that, I must just be unfit’. I blew it off as I’m just too young to have a heart condition.”

The impact of Richard’s collapse was made clear at Mansfield last August when one mum, of a boy only six or seven, told him her son no longer rode motorbikes. It was the trauma of what he saw.

“She wanted him to come and see me, to see I was all right now,” he says. Working out how to approach people left him floundering.

“You can only say thank you so much for saving your life. But what made it easier is they were so grateful to see me there as well.”