February 20th is my heart day. On this day one year ago I had a pacemaker fitted. It was the denouement of a sequence of events which started 3 months before.

I had fainted one evening with friends in November 2024 - I went over like a felled Redwood tree, still clutching the glass tumbler as I went down. Friends who saw me when I arrived had remarked that I looked grey.

The experience of losing consciousness was a little alarming: my peripheral vision went first, and I had just enough time to say to my friend. "Mate, I think I'm going to faint", before he had to stop me falling through the plate glass French door.

But the sensation of gradually returning to consciousness was truly blissful. I distinctly remember that half-waking state with my eyes still closed. Around me I became aware of the people hubbub again, but I also had a clear image in my mind's eye of a long dark tunnel ahead of me. It was like a choice: come back to the party, or press on down that tunnel. Both were equally beautiful and enticing. I genuinely could have done either, but I chose to come back to the party. "Choose life", to quote Ewan MacGregor's character in the film Trainspotting, possibly slightly out of context…

And so I was back in the room, but not for long. I hadn't yet become centre of attention, but my heart did its best to put me in the limelight that evening.

I was already rather taken aback, even embarrassed, that I had passed out. This kind of thing never happened to me. At university they used to say I had the constitution of an ox. But no more than five minutes after coming round, it happened again.

My friends suggested they help me get outside and sit in the fresh air for a bit, but they didn't manage to get me over the threshold of those same French windows, before the darkness closed in for a second time: "Guys, I'm going again…"

I'm sure Oscar Wilde would have said something like "to faint once at a party is unfortunate, to faint a second time in 15 minutes is attention-seeking."

The rest of the evening passed without further incident. I knew I had to get myself checked out, so I went to the doctor's as soon after that evening as possible. He told me that that state of rigour (stiff like a Redwood tree) had meant my heart had skipped two consecutive beats. He gave me an ECG and a blood test. Ironically, the call I got back from him 5 days later had a completely new and unexpected headline: my PSA levels were elevated. I now needed my prostate checked. In the news business, that's what they call changing the lead.

After an MRI scan, it was decided I should have a biopsy on the prostate, and one Tuesday in January I was on the trolley in the anaesthetists' anteroom being readied for my procedure. What should have been five minutes turned into 30, as the nurse and consultant conferred over the latest ECG. Eventually, the anaesthetist had news that my already unorthodox Tuesday wasn't going to turn out as I had expected: "Julian, I'm afraid you're not going to have a prostate biopsy today, because I can't be sure your heart can take a general anaesthetic. I think you have 3rd degree AV block. I've sent your ECG to a cardiologist friend of mine, and you should make an appointment with him. We can do your prostate biopsy when it's sorted." And so the heart swapped places with the prostate for the lead again - just like a day in the newsroom.

I had no idea how serious it was, apart from that fact that my heart was in no fit state to take a general anaesthetic. The cardiologist told me to give this latest ECG to my GP and ask for a referral. That I duly did: about 15 minutes after uploading the online request to the surgery, I got a call back from a duty doctor (15 minutes, that's a record). She told me, in no uncertain terms, to get a cab to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, and report to A&E immediately, "and whatever you do, do NOT drive yourself". (There was a risk I could pass out at the wheel.) Do not pass 'GO', do not collect £200.

The severity of the situation dawned on me when I was fast-tracked through A&E like a BA Gold card holder, and before I knew it, I was wired up to a heart monitor in a transit ward. The registrar told me it was very likely I'd have a pacemaker fitted. A pacemaker? Holy shit! Moi? They were organising a bed for me in the Cardiology ward. Meanwhile I was happily watching the 6 Nations rugby on my phone, while the monitor alarms were going off left right and centre, flashing red. The nurses kept asking me if I was feeling OK - I was watching England forwards thunder around the pitch at max HR, meanwhile my heart was clocking in at 24 beats per minute. That's like a blue whale on opioids. No wonder the nurses were worried. I didn't notice a thing.

I spent my whole stay in the cardiology ward permanently wired up to a heart monitor. My night's sleep was always interrupted at least three times by the monitor's alarm going off as my heart rate dipped below 40bpm, and the duty nurse coming in to check I was OK. I wasn't even allowed to go to the loo unaccompanied in case I fainted. Eventually they allowed me a mobile monitor which I carried around with me on a shoulder strap, so I could even wash! The days would have been interminably boring if I hadn't decided to create a complete online course to teach my storytelling operating system.

After various tests, including a 72-hour continuous ECG of my heart, the consultant's opinion was that I had AV block but it was 'only' 2nd degree. An AV block is a type of arrhythmia where the electrical impulse generating a heart beat gets interrupted between the upper cardiac chambers, the atria, and the lower chambers, the ventricles. The GCSE Biology came in handy. Apparently 1st degree is common, and means an occasional blip, 2nd degree means the heart beat gradually slips out of sync, until it corrects itself, and the cycle starts again - slipping out of sync, then correcting itself. "If you get any more symptoms, come back, but for a man of your age (I was 51 at the time) with your level of fitness (VO2 Max of 48.5), I wouldn't want to fit a pacemaker right now."

Stand down for now, was the message. So now I had two different opinions. One said 2nd degree block, another saying 3rd degree block - the most serious, where the electrical impulse never makes it down to the lower heart chambers, and there's no heart beat. When I fainted, that was what had happened - twice.

I sought a third opinion, and it came down on the side of 3rd degree block.

So now I was in a situation where the NHS wouldn't fit a pacemaker, because their opinion was that I didn't need one yet, while two other cardiologists reckoned I had the most serious type of heart block. At this point, the first cardiologist (the prostate anaesthetist's friend) told me, in the classic under-stated manner for which hospital consultants are well-known, "We should probably get this thing sorted, because this condition will only get worse over days, weeks and months."

The former journalist in me knows very well that what's unsaid is as important as what is said, so his ellipsis was not lost on me. My interpretation was "without a pacemaker, I had a year."

The waiting list for an elective pacemaker was six months. My only option was going private if I wanted it sooner - so it was time for me to try my private health insurance.

I have a chequered history with health insurance. In 2010, I was refused life insurance because my resting pulse was 36 bpm. The medical term for a low resting pulse is bradycardia. I used to cycle 100 miles a week back 'n' forth between home in Windsor and the ITV studios in Central London. The previous year I did L'Étape du Tour, where amateur cyclists ride a mountain stage of the Tour de France a few days before the pros. I was in good shape. It took an examination and a letter from a fellow cyclist and cardiologist to get a clean bill of health and my life insurance. But looking back at that letter, there was one phrase which now has a whole new resonance: "The ECG showed a sinus bradycardia with first degree heart block." There it was, already there in 2010, lurking, but causing no trouble…yet.

And that was the reason why my health insurer 15 years on was refusing to cover me for bradycardia. I had thought my bradycardia was athletic (lots of cycling), in fact my bradycardia was also, at least to some degree, pathological (a lurking heart condition).

So the only option remaining was to pay for my pacemaker myself: £20,000, not an insignificant amount of money, but in the wider scheme of things, a relatively small amount to pay to choose life.

I had a decision to make. The gods made the decision for me.

It was a dreary Saturday afternoon in February, and we were watching my son play football at Haileybury, my wife Luisa's old school. All of a sudden I got the same weird sensation that I was about to faint. Thankfully I didn't lose consciousness this time, but I told Luisa, and she helped me to the match-duty paramedics. They said I should go to the nearest A&E, which was in Harlow, Essex.

Luisa left my son to go home with a school friend and off we went, 45 minutes even further east, and away from home, to another hospital. The cardiac Gold Card worked a treat again: yet another ECG confirmed 3rd degree AV block, and I was told they wanted to admit me to fit a pacemaker there and then.

This was it, finally (I thought), and I begged the team in Essex to allow my wife Luisa to drive me back to Oxford, closer to home, and a cardiology centre of excellence where they already knew me. No offence to the good county of Essex - it would have caused more logistical complications if I had been admitted there. They agreed, but not until I had been given a drug to keep my heart rate up for the 2.5 hour journey. 75 miles an hour and as many beats per minute all the way. Flashed the cardiac Gold Card again, and I was back in the cardiology ward for the second time in a month. "Oh I remember you!" - the comforting refrain of familiarity from one of the John Radcliffe nurses.

I was admitted for a second time.

More tests, more nights interrupted by my low heart rate setting off alarms, but this time it was to decide whether I should have a pacemaker or an internal defibrillator fitted. I had no idea a human body could have implanted a mini version of the equipment which now gives red public phone boxes a new lease of life. I read some cycling forum posts by people who'd had a defib fitted. Some reported being thrown off their bikes when the defibrillator activated. I wasn't keen.

In the end, it was agreed that a pacemaker not an internal defibrillator was right for me - thank you, ye gods!

The next decision was what kind of pacemaker. For the last three decades, pacemakers have been a metal box fitted under the skin of the left side of the chest, with wires running from the box to the heart. A new kind of device is now available - called a leadless pacemaker. It's smaller than a AAA battery and is inserted up the femoral vein through a small incision in the groin via its own catheter directly into the left ventricle, where it is screwed into the heart wall. Everything is done via a custom controller at the end of the catheter which looks like it was modified off a gaming console. From there the implanted device is configured over Bluetooth from outside the body. Sonos for the heart! I've been an early adopter of technology all my life, so this was the obvious choice for me.

Now it was just a case of scheduling the procedure.

Hospitals are in a different time zone. It's not your time zone. You have no influence or control over when things happen. There's no point in getting frustrated. I was just relieved that my NHS pathway was now days rather than months.

I had been admitted on the Saturday. By the Thursday, it was clear my procedure was going to happen the following week, which was half term. We were booked as a family to go to Morocco for that week - it's the last realistic opportunity for a break for one's teenage brood doing exams that year (in our case my daughter and her A-Levels).

I couldn't start negotiating with a hard-pressed NHS about when to have my op. In any case, until I did have it, I was unfit to fly, which also meant I had to reschedule a client team coaching engagement in Italy. My lovely clients were extremely understanding.

So did that mean the holiday was off? For me, yes, but we agreed Luisa would take the kids, while I stayed at home waiting for the call to come back to hospital and have my pacemaker fitted.

I had survived this long without it, I could survive another few days. Just not a year, as that consultant had told me.

On the Monday of half term I got the call to come into hospital for the procedure on the Thursday.

The pacemaker clinic is a day clinic, with a batch of patients admitted in the morning, and they work through the list. Patients are wheeled out of the waiting ward in turn and come back an hour later, still slightly out of it from the anaesthetic, and within another hour or two, they walk out, accompanied by a friend or family member, newly bionic. The cliché is valid: it's a miracle of modern medicine. Things they can do these days, etc.

I was the last on the list that day. I was escorted into the operating theatre on foot, and invited to sit on the bed. 'Civilians' don't get to see the inside of an operating theatre very often, because they're usually sparko already. I found it fascinating, and actually not dissimilar from being in a TV news studio. A team of 10 or so experts in their own field, all with their own clearly defined roles and the equipment to perform them.

I was the centre of all the orbits around me, yet utterly without agency or responsibility, except to answer some critical questions to confirm my identity and my understanding of what was about to happen to me. Plus, there was a couple of friendly exchanges with medical staff whom I recognised from my previous visits!

Then Dr Kim Rajappan, the cardiologist surgeon and equivalent of the director in this particular studio, called the equivalent of the pre-production meeting. A highly structured and disciplined fifteen minutes, which, for the final time, confirmed everyone's roles in the hour ahead. Simultaneously my role both receded into passive insignificance and elevated to the star of the show. All I could do was listen and take in what was finally about to happen to me.

Then it was time to get to work. Last job of the day before home time. I was invited to lie down, a mask went over my nose and mouth, and the next thing I knew I came to, blissfully high, in the recovery room.

Although it's a day procedure, I had to stay in hospital one more night because the day ward closed at 5pm and I still needed the observation period before being discharged.

All went smoothly, and my friend brought me home the following morning.

So there I was, officially bionic, and the end of a three-month saga. Within three days I was back on my bike - albeit the indoor trainer, which removed the risk of falling off and re-opening my small wound.

So what have I learned in this year?

I am not invincible. I suspect that's something everyone comes to realise at some point in their lives, sooner or later. That's mortality.

The moment I was first told I would need a pacemaker back in January 2025 triggered a whole personal inquiry: was there anything I could or should have done differently in my life? Was my love of cycling to blame? The doctors told me that in medical terms, anyone who did more than 7 hours exercise a week was classed as an athlete. I genuinely don't believe I merited that label - I was just trying to stay healthy…ish. What about that 300km ride round a Swedish lake in one night in 2023? Or that 200km ride on Tuscan gravel on a vintage bike in 2024? Could it be that my efforts at self-care actually accelerated my own demise? That's just too ironic. The fact is, it is what it is. Ridiculous phrase, but it's at times like these it actually comes into its own.

I've learned a lot this year about health and fitness after 50: we oldies should not spend more than 25% of our exercise time at high intensity; maintaining strength, body mass, flexibility and for men, testosterone levels, are critical. Healthy exercise isn't just about cardio. So I do slightly less on the bike and commit to the weekly kettle bells, burpees and bodyweight sessions at the village bootcamp. I haven't got to yoga yet, but I know I should!

I don't need to prove anything to myself anymore. I still love riding my bike with friends and on my own, but being a hero nowadays means knowing what's enough.

I don't know if what I experienced at the party between faints was a near-death experience or not, but it sure felt like what one might feel like.

Choose life. I never thought I'd be heeding advice from a fictional junkie. The strangest thing about that experience was that the other option, going down that long dark tunnel in my case, felt equally blissful and enticing. But there's a time for everything, and it wasn't the right time for that. If that was death, I'm not scared of it, and that, paradoxically, helps me choose life.

So to answer one remaining question. Why am I sharing this?

Because men of my age aren't great at talking about health - it's not one of our strengths. I believe we need to get better at it. It's OK not to be invincible, and it's important for men to know that other men also have a shit time sometimes. You can pretend you're "crushing it" all the time as much as you like, but I don't believe you, and I don't believe everyone else believes you. Why? Because I don't think everyone else is crushing it all the time either. Life's just not like that.

I've previously written about my own burn-out with extreme work-stress because I know that other men my age have gone through, or are going through the same thing, and it's OK. This stuff happens - it's not great, but it's a lot easier to deal with when you realise that you're not the only one going through something like it. When you get to my age (52), you're well down Sniper's Alley. This is the time when a hitherto unknown health issue can rear its ugly head, and if you don't catch it early, it might catch you. Just like asking questions is a sign of strength, so is shining a light in those dark places.

Get yourself a full health MOT for your 50th birthday present to yourself. Get a PSA test done every year. Get that colonoscopy done. It doesn't mean you're weak if you discover something. Weak is to stick your head in the sand and ignore it until it's too late.

I'm not writing this for the likes. Nothing could be more fatuous. If I help just one man get himself checked out, then this article has done its job.

And, my friend, if you want to talk, then get in touch.

And by the way, I got the prostate biopsy done, and it was clear. Just waiting for the results of this year's PSA test.