His heart stopped in a St. John's emergency room after waiting more than 8 hours, now he's calling for change

After a more than eight-hour wait at one emergency department in St. John's, and a wild ride across the city to a second one, Paul Reid saw his heart monitor go berserk before he lost consciousness.

The next thing he remembers is looking up and seeing a large man above him.

"Who's that up there? What's he doing up there? He's back up there again. What's he doing up there?" said Reid.

"I flatlined. The nurse, luckily, was a six-foot, strapping man and he was on top of me giving me CPR. I came to a couple of times and I could see him and I knew I wasn't seeing the lord."

Reid's describing what happened to him at St. Clare's Mercy Hospital on June 14, 2023. He's thankful for the nurse who was part of the team that resuscitated him. He's had heart surgery and recovered well. But, he said, the events that led up to his crisis were unacceptable.

"I had waited eight and a half hours in the ER. I ended up leaving the Health Sciences Centre and going to St. Clare's. I survived, but I had some trouble dealing with the situation. It took me about a year to get over it," he said.

He's speaking out now after hearing a St. John's emergency doctor tell CBC News that someone is going to die in an ER if the problem of hospital overcrowding isn't addressed quickly.

"I heard that and I thought, 'hang on, it has happened.' It happened to me," he said.

Reid, who worked as a quality engineer in the offshore oil and gas industry for three decades, used the health authority's complaints and compliments process after his experience.

"I wanted to use my experience to help improve the health-care system. I didn't really think that process was as significant as I thought it might be. I got the feeling that they just wanted me to go away," he said.

Reid's story began decades earlier. He said his father's family is "riddled" with heart disease, and his mother and siblings died young. Reid also had a heart attack in 2007.

So in June 2023, when he had pain that radiated down his arm, he worried something was seriously wrong.

"I'd been dealing with what I thought were indigestion pains for a number of years, and I'm sure they were angina attacks and I just paid no attention to them," he said.

"But this one morning I had several. I knew something was coming on and we were shopping and the pain went up … my neck, out my shoulders, down my arms and I said to the wife 'we got to go to the hospital. We have to go now. I'm in trouble.'"