Father of 'the boy who came back' opens up about his son's near-death experience
26 May 2025, 13:11 | Updated: 27 May 2025, 08:25
Father recounts son's near-death experience
Archie Bland’s son Max, was just a few weeks old when his heart stopped beating without warning one night in what has been called a case of sudden infant death syndrome interrupted.
Listen to this article
Loading audio...
Bland, who is the editor of the Guardian’s first edition newsletter, called emergency workers who managed to bring young Max back.
Now, speaking to LBC’s Paul Brand, Bland has opened up about the ordeal and what it has been like raising a young child with serious disabilities.
He said: “It was very early in the morning and there was nothing that appeared to be wrong before it happened.
“But we had just moved house. We had a night nanny at the time who was helping us through that move, which is something that weighs on me in complicated ways now. And she came into our room at about just before six in the morning telling us that something was wrong and Max wasn't breathing and he was cold to touch something very clearly, very wrong.
“So that was how it began. We called 999. We had the police with us very quickly with a defibrillator. Before that, we had to do CPR ourselves with somebody on the other end of the phone guiding us through it. And, you know, we thought we'd lost him, or at least I thought we'd lost him.
“And first the police and then the paramedics came and they managed to get Max breathing again, get him having a pulse again. So that was the kind of the beginning of the story. But, you know, it's a long and complicated story. It was a terrible, terrible day. And we're so happy that we have him, but obviously the consequences are very complicated.”
Opening up about the hours and days after Max's miraculous recovery, he added: “Well, it's a rollercoaster ride. And your definition of good news changes pretty profoundly. I mean, you hear lots of things that if you'd been told them 24 hours, 48 hours earlier, would have seemed like the worst news you could have ever had in your life.
“But the first thing we were told was that on the basis of a scan, they had done sort of a bedside scan that they can do, rather than one that requires going to a full MRI machine, that it looked as if there had been damage to Max's brainstem and that it was the most severe kind of damage that there could be, and that he might have lost consciousness, that he might have lost cognition altogether and the ability to breathe on his own. And, you know, really the very, very worst news that you could have, and that was probably our kind of deepest low, as you can imagine.
“And then the next day they did another scan and they found that the news was a little bit better than that. I mean, profoundly better than that.
“Because what they told us was that instead of being severe, the damage was moderate to severe. And that meant that probably the areas of Max's brain that affected his movement and his speech, which would be affected in ways that weren't completely clear at the time, that it was too early to know how his sort of cognition and his sort of presence in that way would be affected. But you know, that Max was here, that he hadn't gone away. And so that was the beginning of the journey to Max as a very nearly two-year-old and very cheerful guy that he is now.
“But, yeah, one of the weirdest things about it is you're like, thank God it's a moderate brain injury. And that is not something you would have anticipated saying very shortly before.”
