He died six months ago, in a dense and dark New Zealand forest.

But he is here, listening to parents Paul and Patsy recount the day their teenage son collapsed and stopped breathing on a family holiday.

Liam remembers nothing of the collapse.

Nor does he recall the series of miracles which brought him back after his heart went into arrhythmia, leading to a massive cardiac arrest.

It was April 19 and Liam was 15.

PAUL and Patsy Shay arrived in New Zealand on April 7 with Liam and their older son Jamon, who turned 17 six days into the trip.

They got to picturesque Hanmer Springs on April 19, happy to be two hours north of Christchurch which was still shaking in the aftermath of the 6.3-magnitude earthquake that had struck in late February.

“We checked into the place we were staying right on 2pm,” Paul says.

“There is a heritage forest next to the township and we thought we’d go for a walk.

“Myself and Patsy headed off with Liam but Jamon headed off in his own direction. We weren’t as adventurous as he was, we went into the flat.”

It was about an hour later when Paul and Patsy decided they had had enough and wanted to head back to their accommodation.

Liam wanted to go on.

“He had been selected to go to Spain for World Youth Day and I hadn’t been real keen on him going,” Paul said.

“He was only 15 so it’s a bit of a worry for a parent.

“But he’d been using this holiday to prove to us he was a reliable young man who could do what he was asked to do.”

So Paul gave Liam some money for lunch after the walk, made arrangements for him to be back by a certain time and away the teen went.

“He bounded off into the forest, large as life, his chest puffed out and he was fine,” Paul says.

“He didn’t complain of anything, he was as bright as a button,

determined to prove to us he could do whatever it was he set out to do.”

Not too long after, while shopping for groceries, Paul and Patsy saw an ambulance race down the town’s main street.

He and his wife remember thinking, “someone’s in trouble”.

Later Jamon, who was perched on a hill taking in the stunning scenery of Hanmer Springs, saw an air ambulance fly overhead.

He remembers thinking, “someone’s in trouble”.

They had no idea it was Liam.

THE designated time for Liam to arrive back at the

motel came and went with no sign of him.

“I went up the street looking for him. It’s only a little township so if he was there I thought I would find him,” Paul said.

“I couldn’t so I went back to the motel to see if he was there. Still no sign of him.

“So then I thought, ‘well, I’ve only had a man’s look’, so I headed off with Patsy to go back down to the town and look again and was sure the two of us would find him.”

When there was still no sign of Liam, Paul decided to return to the forest to look for his son.

No sign of Liam.

It was starting to get dark.

“It was getting to the point of worrying when I couldn’t find him up the street,” he said.

“I was getting pretty anxious and in fact it was Jamon who was the level-headed one of us.

“The bloke from the motel said Liam had probably just become disoriented in the forest and had come out at the wrong spot and I could understand that because it was a very dark, very dense forest.

“He explained there was a road around the forest so I got in the car and tried driving around to look for him but he wasn’t there.”

It was not like Liam. The Shay family were getting more and more anxious.

Back at the motel, nearing 6.30pm, it was decided to get the emergency services in to search for Liam.

The short, sharp sound of the town’s emergency siren sent a chill through Paul, Patsy and Jamon.

Paul waited outside, “hoping that Liam was going to just walk back out of the shadows”.

AS he waited, the town’s policeman drove up to the motel.

“He asked if we could identify our son,” Paul said.

“I said, ‘yes, we’ve got a photo on the camera’.

“We were showing him the photo and then I realised he wouldn’t know what our son was wearing, he wouldn’t know his height, so I started to explain all that and he said, ‘that won’t be necessary’.

“And just a chill went through us again.

“He just sort of said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you but your son collapsed

in the forest this afternoon and he was airlifted to Christchurch hospital.

“He said Liam was breathing at the time he was airlifted … that’s all he could tell us.

“That’s all anyone could tell us until we got to the hospital in Christchurch.”

It was about 9.30pm when Paul, Patsy and Jamon arrived at Christchurch hospital to find Liam in intensive care.

“We were told it was pretty bad. They said, ‘just go in there and be with him’,” Paul said.

“They didn’t know what was going on at that stage. It was a terrible night.

“Over the course of the next two or three days we came to know what happened in that period when Liam was missing.

“Essentially, at quarter past three, he collapsed in the middle of the forest on his own.

“And this is where the miracles started to kick in for us.”

JAMES was a young English backpacker working in the kitchen of a hostel in Hanmer Springs at the time of the Shay family’s holiday.

On Tuesday, April 19, James’ boss said he could have the afternoon off. James decided he would go for a walk in the forest and plotted a course.

He set off without his mobile phone but when he realised, he decided to go back and get it.

It was a decision that would save Liam’s life.

As James, 26, walked through the forest he came to a clearing with a multitude of paths leading off it.

One signposted “Alligator Alley” grabbed his attention.

He set off down the path but before long, he thought to himself, “there are no alligators in New Zealand”.

With that realisation, he returned to the path he had originally plotted.

“Thank God he did because when he turned around and went back, there was Liam on the ground,” Paul said.

“The initial phase Liam went into was a faint, and that’s when James came across him. It was the very early stages, thank God.

“Being in the clearing, he was able to get reception on his phone.

“Liam stopped breathing while James was on the phone to the emergency services.”

The Shays later learnt that James’ career in England had involved organising CPR courses and that every now and then, he’d done one himself.

“He told us later it all came flooding back to him,” Paul said.

“James was stuck in that forest, alone, working on our son for 25 minutes, with no help, just pumping away and obviously doing an excellent job to keep our son alive.”

WHEN James came across Liam, the teenager’s heart was in the first stage of an arrhythmia called ventricula fibrillation.

“The heart is made up of two parts, one drawing blood in and one pumping it out and for whatever reason, the lower part of Liam’s heart went into a motion where it was just shaking and it wasn’t pumping any blood out,” Paul said.

The Westpac helicopter had been dispatched after James contacted emergency services.

In the meantime, the medical centre at Hanmer Springs was notified of the emergency in the forest.

“The doctor at the medical centre at the time actually had a broken arm,” Patsy recalls.

“It was indicated that it was a cardiac arrest, as opposed to a heart attack, and with a broken arm she would not have been able to intubate him.”

Intubation involves the skilled task of inserting a tube into the trachea for ventilation.

Without intubation, Liam’s prospects were dire. But luck, or another miracle, was on his side.

“The doctor’s husband was a St John’s ambulance person and he was visiting her from Christchurch on his day off,” Paul said.

“We were just so lucky that he was there because his wife wouldn’t have been able to do anything.

“He had several attempts to intubate him, he got it on the fourth time. But they still couldn’t get his heart going so they had to paddle him four times.”

By the time the Westpac helicopter arrived with three paramedics on board, Liam had only the faintest of pulses.

“We were told that they were going to call it,” Patsy says.

“Then one of the paramedics felt the faintest of pulses in his neck and he said, ‘I’ve got something’. So they took him. As far as we know, they took off for Christchurch at 4.15pm.”

THE Shay family were told Liam was without oxygen for between 45 and 60 minutes.

Damage to the brain starts to set in at about six to eight minutes.

“They did a brain scan and there was nothing to show there had been a stroke,” Paul said.

“We misinterpreted that a bit to mean that there had been no damage to the brain. That’s what you do in those stressful situations.

“And then they had done heart checks and nothing came up. So they gave us some hope.”

Doctors in Christchurch put Liam “on ice” for 24 hours to limit damage to the brain.

“That’s the terminology they use but it’s actually a plastic blanket that they wrapped him up in and they pumped cold water through it to keep his temperature down,” Paul says.

“It just shuts down his body, and he was drugged to be in a coma.”

It was three days later, on Good Friday, that the Shay family were pulled aside by medical staff at Christchurch hospital.

“They told us we needed to prepare for the worst-case scenario,” Paul says.

“Originally they said that in a best-case scenario, he would wake up and everything would be fine.

“Worst case, he will wake up and within 12 months be a capable person where someone meeting him for the first time wouldn’t notice anything different but someone who knew him before might.

“So we were clinging to that.

“But on the Friday they told us the best-case scenario was off the table. Best-case scenario now was that within 12 months he might be back to where he was. Worst case was that we were not going to get our son back, that he was not going to wake up.

“We were stuck in Christchurch, in a city that was shaking.

“We booked the holiday before the earthquake but when it happened we thought, ‘well, we’re not going to be in Christchurch any more than one night’.

“We weren’t supposed to be stuck there for two weeks. Not sure whether our son was going to live or die, sleep deprived, and you’ve got this shake in your hands and every now and then the building would shake as well and you didn’t know if it was just you shaking, or it was the building.”

The Shay family were told that the best thing the hospital could do for them was to get them home.

THE first signs that Liam might in fact come back to his family came on May 3 on his trip back to Melbourne.

While Paul and Jamon flew back on a domestic flight, Patsy was by Liam’s side on a CareFlight with two pilots, a doctor and a nurse.

“He was on a stretcher, paralysed and drugged to the hilt,” Patsy says.

“But then we saw this movement ... he stretched.

“The doctor on the flight said it was definitely an independent movement as opposed to a seizure or something like that.

“It was as if we got into Australian airspace and Liam decided it was time to come back to us.”

Upon arriving at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, the Shays were initially given the same story they had heard in Christ­church. It wasn’t looking good, doctors said.

It was at this point Liam began to prove the doctors wrong.

“They started to do different things with him, he started to improve,” Patsy said.

“I got a smile from him on Mother’s Day (May 8).”

After 14 days in the intensive care unit in Melbourne, Liam had shown enough positive signs for the doctors to agree to send him to an adolescent ward, and rehabilitation.

It was a huge turning point considering the medics held out little hope he would ever be a candidate for rehabilitation.

“I think it was really their first acknowledgment that this kid might do something,” Paul said.

“And that’s where we can say that Liam took over. His positiveness and his strength, that’s where the miracles stopped and the strength that is Liam took over. He just went from strength to strength.

“My wife was there 100 per cent of the time and between the two of them, they just achieved all of these milestones.

“I was down there for my birthday, on May 14, and I walked in to his room and Liam had ripped his tracheotomy out.

“They had decided he was doing OK and not to put it back in.

“And I said to him, ‘Liam, it’s my birthday today’, and the first thing he said to me since he’d got back, he just mouthed it because he had no real voice, was ‘happy birthday’.

“It was beautiful, I bawled my eyes out.”

WHILE the Shay family could see their boy was coming back, it was a long and difficult road as Liam faced the prospect of learning to walk and talk again.

He had wasted away, losing 13 kilograms. His 188-centimetre frame had dropped to 60 kilograms.

He had no muscle tone and his body was going through withdrawal from the drugs that had been pumped into him for weeks.

But Liam was fuelled by a burning desire. He wanted to go home.

“When we would be leaving the hospital we would ask him if he wanted anything and he would say, ‘yes, a train ticket’,” Patsy recalls.

“It was his fight, his determination,” Paul said.

“Before this happened, he was a very good water polo player, and put a lot of effort into training himself, a lot of upper-body strength which was an absolute blessing.

“He used that upper-body strength, it saved him, because where his legs failed him he could use that. He was hoisting himself out of bed and into chairs well before they wanted him to be.

“That enabled him to get back on his feet.”

LIAM set a goal to return to Wodonga by August 31. Patsy made a calendar, and they marked off each day as it passed.

Medical staff told them it was good to have a goal, but not to be too disappointed if it wasn’t realised.

Liam, and his family, never had any doubt that it would be. He had been defying expectations all along and he continues to do so.

He has returned to his English class at Wodonga Catholic College as well as volunteer work once a week.

“Because of the brain injury Liam has sustained, for a time he is going to tire a lot faster than anyone else,” Paul said.

“His brain is essentially rewiring around the damaged parts. It just means that it is having to work a hell of a lot harder than our brains to interpret and decipher the same amount of information.”

But Liam is like any other impatient teenager and just wants to get on with it.

“People ask what I was like before it happened … I don’t get it,” Liam says.

“I was exactly like I am now.

“It’s a bit of a pain but hey, I could be way worse.

“I met tons of kids in that hospital and if I compare myself to some of them … I can still walk, I am still here.”

The Shay family thank God for that. They know fate was on their side the day Liam had his arrhythmic attack.

They met James, the life-saving backpacker, just once but are hopeful the young man who kept their son alive against all odds will make a trip to Australia before he returns to England next year.

Patsy says she’d like to adopt him.

James, too, was sure of the hand of fate.

He told the Shays his boss had never given him an afternoon off. Never.

It was odd, he said.

Something told him to go for a walk, something told him to go back for his phone and something told him to stick to the course he had plotted.

Thank God for that.