Jhonnie Blampied

Jhonnie Blampied, 46, is the former chairman and CEO of DDB Australia. He left the agency in 2003 to take up consultancy work and achieve a better work-life balance...

Unfortunately, I can remember a great deal about my childhood. I really wish I couldn't. One day, when I was four-and-a-half, my mother drove me to day school in Jersey then flew to London and committed suicide, which I didn't discover until I was 30. My parents were already divorced and I was left at school with no-one to pick me up and no-one to go to. It was pretty brutal.

My father was struggling with the divorce and a new marriage and he didn't actually have a place for me. He came and told me about my mother, but then he went away and I was left at the school as a boarder, even though the other boys were all much older - from seven to 18. I had one brother there but it was a really terrible existence.

I spell my name 'Jhonnie' because I was dyslexic as a kid and that was what looked correct to me. I was made to write with my right hand when I was naturally left-handed and it crossed all the wires in my brain. It was not until I was 12 that I realised Jhonnie was the wrong spelling, but I kept it to remind myself of where I had come from and the things I had overcome.

I started in advertising as a planner at Ogilvy & Mather in London, then I decided I wanted to work overseas. I'd travelled a bit and I thought, "There's something more to this world than England and I want to see it." Generally, I find some of the English rather pompous and difficult and I don't feel very English myself. I got myself a job as a strategic planner with DDB in Sydney and just fell in love with [the country and] became an Australian citizen, I support the Wallabies over the Poms and I've got four Aussie kids aged from three to 15.

After 15 years with DDB I decided to leave because I wanted a better quality of life and to be with my family more. Doing a big management job meant that I was overseas for many months of the year and was always working late, I thought there had to be a better way. I left the agency in February 2003, although I was still doing some consulting. Then in September I had the mountain bike accident.

My injuries were pretty horrific. I had a haematoma, which is a posh name for a giant swollen bruise on my hip; I broke all the ribs down my right hand side; some of the broken ribs speared my right lung, causing it to bleed internally and begin drowning me in my own blood; there was a big hole in my bicycle helmet and a big hole in my head; I had a brain haemorrhage, one broken arm, and on the other arm had been ripped out of its shoulder socket; I fractured my right cheek and three of the five nerves around my right eye. On the Glasgow Trauma Index I scored a three - the same as if you're dead. So I was in a bad way.

The man who saved my life was a medic called Dr Rob Turner, the CareFlight [emergency rescue] doctor. He put me on an artificial respirator in the chopper to help me breathe and gave me an injection to reduce swelling in the brain. That was the most dramatic contribution to my recovery - plus having him at the scene of the accident within an hour.

One extraordinary thing about my injury was that I could remember my coma thoughts; my brain surgeon was fascinated by that because it's very, very uncommon. I can remember being offered death; they said, "If you want to leave this life we have another one ready for you." Because I'm a good negotiator, I said, "Can I have a look?" and they said, "No, but you can look at the life you'd be leaving." I looked at it and felt nothing. I remember it was like watching photographs of your uncle's childhood; you recognise some of the faces vaguely, but you're not in the picture.

I thought, "Okay, I'm feeling nothing, so I'm ready to go." Then I heard my wife's voice. She and my best friend, Peter Evans, used to come to the hospital and talk to me all the time that I was in a coma. I heard Ruth's voice and I followed it; I used it to navigate the corridors of my coma and come back.

It was actually the most romantic experience of my life, bar none, because when you have such a severe brain haemorrhage your memory is wiped completely clean; you really have to recover and reprocess absolutely everything. I got to fall in love again and normally you never get to do that with the person you marry. Experiencing it again is gorgeous because you don't have any worries or fears about whether you'll get on, or whether you'll be funny, or who's paying for dinner. It is so incredibly pure.

The doctor who rescued me, Rob, stayed on at the hospital to talk to Ruth even though he'd been on duty for 36 hours. He told her there was a 50/50 chance that I would live. Ruth, being an extraordinary optimist, said, "Oh, that's not so bad. That's an unbeatable favourite for the Melbourne Cup."

The weirdest thing happened about six months later. Ruth had written down Rob's phone number but had lost it in the general confusion. She was telling another mother in the playground the two-minute version of what had happened to me and the mother said, "You should talk to Rob. I think he's a helicopter doctor." Ruth went across the playground and didn't recognise Rob at first because the last time she'd seen him he'd been at the end of a long shift and was unshaven and all the rest of it. But he looked at her and immediately said, "West Head?" which is where the accident happened. She just burst into tears

My rehab team gave me a nickname: Miracle Man. One of the greatest compliments I've ever received was from one of the doctors. He said, "If I ever have a brain injury I want to recover like you." A recovery like mine was not within their experience, and they've seen a lot.

When I came out of injury, for a year or so afterwards people were incredibly wary and quite afraid of me. They were really frightened of brain injury and it's amazing at parties just how suspicious people are of someone who doesn't drink; alcohol is such a big part of our socialising. It took me about two years to feel like myself again and there was a lot of prejudice about whether I would recover. Now, people don't refer to it at all and that is actually quite a relief.

My surviving this accident has been like being lifted out of my body and moved 30 feet to the left. I'm still looking at the same landscape, but things I thought were very important to me, I can no longer see because they're covered up by trees and bushes in the foreground. And things I could never see before, I can now see clearly. So it's having a different perspective on the same life, which is extraordinary.

One example of that is to do with the whole business ego thing. I have no desire or aspiration to run a big agency any more. My passion for advertising is completely intact, but I'm much more intolerant of stupidity and poor thinking and there's a lot of that about. I'm freelancing for a number of agencies as a strategy planner and shaking things about and having a lot of fun.

In advertising at the moment there's an amazing opportunity to do things differently and to do them better. I think that a lot of clients have been through a very tough time over the last decade. Most of them are operating with reduced costs but are making less money, so they're looking for ideas and creative thinking and better ways of doing things, yet they're struggling to get people to help them. They don't know where to go, and that's where the opportunity is.

I started out in advertising with Ogilvy & Mather and one of David Ogilvy's most famous advertisements was The Man in the Hathaway Shirt, who, of course, wore an eye patch. I now have an eye patch, which is quite a weird coincidence.

I chose life over death and with that choice has come a lot of responsibility to do things right for the first time in my life. I'm closely engaged with my kids and their lives in a way that I would never have been if this terrible thing hadn't happened. Our son William was at pre-school and Dr Rob's kids were in the same class. So I went along with my eye patch and a sword and a paper parrot on my shoulder, and I put on silly voices and read pirate stories for a morning. It was a wonderful, wonderful thing. There are not many dads who ever get to do that.

My greatest fear? I don't want to be ordinary, or my children to be ordinary or my work to be ordinary. I've had that drive throughout my entire life; the fear of being ordinary comes from deep inside me.

The accident has not made me more protective of my children. I'm not one of life's worriers. I think they need to do everything with care, but the stuff that is dangerous is the fun stuff. I used to ski and climb mountains and everything else, and the thrill of danger is exhilarating. You can't protect kids from that; you just have to help teach them to make the right choices.

In a perfect world I would... do my damnedest to make it imperfect so that we could all learn something. There's not much learning in perfect.

If I could relive my life I would… I actually am reliving my life. This is not a hypothetical idea for me.

Since the accident I've got myself insanely fit - even fitter than when I was as a teenager. I've lost 32kg, I'm a lot healthier and happier than I've ever been. I've always been pretty positive but now I'm filled with hope. I have never felt more alive.

I don't have a message to offer other people as a result of my accident, just a fact: life is what you make it and everything's a choice.

In the end, the only things that matter are your actions, not the words you use.