Mac the life

Ray "Mac" McElwain is a one-man joke machine. He has a gag for every occasion: the war in the Gulf, IDS, his missus - nothing escapes Mac's patter. He even jokes about the deep, livid scar running the length of his left leg and the slightly paler one dissecting his chest - subjects most would regard as no laughing matter.

Sitting in the NAAFI at Yorkshire Air Museum at Elvington, where Mac has volunteered for the last ten years, he gives a quick flash of his scars and his humour: "I was sitting right here just a week or so after my bypass operation with seven mates. Do you know, six out of the eight of us had had the same operation?

"We all bared our chests and rolled up our trouser legs - it was like the bloody Masons."

He is an obviously happy man, a man who relishes life, but it was not always so. Before his triple bypass operation 16 weeks ago, Mac was miserable.

"It got to the point where I was thinking of grabbing two bottles of aspirin and heading up on to the moors," he says. "I honestly thought I was going to die. My dad died at 62 and both my grandfathers went in their 40s - all of them had heart attacks. What chance did I have?"

Mac started getting pains in his chest two years ago. He thought he had chronic indigestion, but his doctor diagnosed angina. He suffered occasional attacks at first but, during a holiday in Las Vegas, his condition moved up a gear and he began suffering one, two and then three attacks every day.

"I had been fit as a fiddle all my life, so being ill really hit me," he says. "The attacks would literally take my breath away. I would be standing there holding my chest, or I would just crash out altogether. I felt bloody awful."

Mac, 67, came to Yorkshire from his native London 17 years ago to set up an SAS survival school. It didn't work out, but his printing business did and he made a good life for himself and his wife Daphne in Malton.

When the attacks started taking over his life, he returned to his doctor, only to have an attack in the waiting room. Subsequent tests at Scarborough Hospital showed he had had a heart attack.

"I said if that's a heart attack I've had at least 50 of them," says Mac.

He was loaded up with medication - aspirin, pills for his blood pressure, drugs to keep his cholesterol in check - and he began to feel a little better. Until, that is, he had an appointment with a heart specialist to discuss his angiogram results.

"As soon as I walked in the door he hit me with it," says Mac. "It's bad news, he said, you need an operation, and if you don't have it, you'll die. There was no sugar coating on it at all."

He was immediately referred to a heart surgeon who hit him with more bad news. The operation was going to be technically difficult because his blockages were in unusual, hard-to-reach places. And he would have to wait at least six months before the operation could take place.

"I knew there was no way I would live that long," explains Mac. "He said they would bring me in if anything happened in the meantime, but I pointed out that if I had a massive heart attack I probably wouldn't survive the wait for the ambulance, the 24-mile journey to Scarborough and the transfer to the operating theatre in Cottingham. I certainly didn't rate my chances."

After talking it over with his family, he phoned the surgeon's secretary the following morning and asked how much it would cost to go private.

"She immediately offered me a ten-day fixed price package for £10,187," he says. "It was like booking a holiday with Thomsons.

"I asked if I could have an early date and she phoned back ten minutes later to tell me I was booked in on Monday. My six-month wait was now just six days."

Sixteen weeks ago, Mac was admitted to Castle Hill Hospital at Cottingham, near Hull, where the heart surgery team carried out a successful triple heart bypass without complications. Or so he thought.

"One of the lads here (the Air Museum) has contacts at Castle Hill," he says. "When I visited the NAAFI after my op he shook my hand and said I was a very lucky man. I asked him what he meant and he said 'well, you nearly died, didn't you?'. I had no idea what he was talking about."

Daphne then admitted she had received an emergency call from the hospital just hours before his operation to say he had crashed out after a major attack. It took them two hours to stabilise him.

"She hadn't wanted to worry me," says Mac. "How many women do you know who could have kept a secret like that?"

He has nothing but praise for the surgeon and the hospital who, he says, saved his life. And he doesn't begrudge paying out more than £10,000 because he knows about 70 per cent of the cash has been ploughed back into the NHS as payment for the hospital facilities and may just bump another heart patient up the waiting list. He doesn't have time for grudges and regrets - he has a life to live.

Before his op he couldn't walk 100 yards uphill without stopping for a breather. Six weeks after his operation he walked 12 miles along the cliffs from Ravenscar to Robin Hood's Bay.

Last year he tried to swim a width of the pool on holiday in Thailand and had to be dragged out by lifeguards. Eight weeks after his bypass he swam 11 lengths of the hotel pool in Cyprus, followed closely by a scuba diving expedition in Malta.

To say he is fighting fit is to undersell his energy levels. He now spends his spare time restoring a Dakota for next year's 60th anniversary of D-Day, planning a sponsored cyclo-walk (walk uphill, cycle down) from John O'Groats to Land's End to raise money for the British Heart Foundation, and dreaming of flying a two-seater aerobatic plane over the North Yorkshire countryside.

"I'd really like to get my National Private Pilot's Licence," says Mac, who worked for BOAC as an engineer. "I've loved planes all my life since I first saw them flying over London during the war. Okay, so some of them were dropping bombs on us, but it didn't put me off."

In the meantime, he has more earthbound pleasures on his mind.

"I have rediscovered life," he says. "I made love four times last night. Then I woke up. Hey, did you hear the one about...?"

Updated: 11:53 Monday, November 10, 2003