Would you give a crack addict mouth-to-mouth if you found him unconscious on your doorstep? I did, and I was convinced I was going to die, writes SACHIN KUREISHI

I’ll tell it exactly as I remember it, although traumatic memories like these can mislead.

What I know for sure is that it was early afternoon on November 16, 2019, and I was standing in the front hallway of my family home in Shepherd’s Bush, the culturally and racially diverse core of west London where my twin brother and I were born and raised . upwards. We were both getting ready in front of the full length mirror, prepping and preening.

At 12:25 I texted the friend we were meeting for lunch: “I’m leaving now.”

At 12:31 p.m., I sent a second text: “I’m currently dealing with a man who was passed out on my doorstep. Tear.’

My brother had discovered him there, lying splayed in front of our house. He was a huge, hulking man, probably in his thirties, but prematurely aged by his bad habits. Around him were dirty glass bottles and drug paraphernalia.

By now my brother and I had become accustomed to the rougher side of ‘the Bush’. Our mother’s street, with its pretty terraced houses, acts as a thoroughfare from the main street to the residential part of the area – a side street for drunks, addicts and criminals who want to do their business in privacy. All too often their occupation is to relieve themselves, usually in the front part of our house, the first on the street, while my mother attacks them from her top window.

At 12:33 I called 999. The operator put me through to the ambulance service and a woman who was straightforward and instructed me to perform a series of tests on the man to check his vitals. Then the truth began to reveal itself: there was no indication that he was still alive.

The operator told us that an ambulance was on its way, but in the meantime we had to move it from the stairs to a flat surface. It’s good to know that this was a big man, over six feet tall, and he wouldn’t be of much help to us. With the help of a passerby, a man in his late 20s who looked too clean and scared to get out of the area, we decided to carefully drag him down the stairs to the basement of the house. Then the situation took another grim turn.

As a student of philosophy, I had struggled for years with questions about morality and the nature of altruism. These theoretical questions came into focus when the operator issued the following command: “Now one of you will have to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

Under normal circumstances I enjoy kissing, and I believe that, on balance, most people would kiss a stranger to save their lives. There is a romance in it, ‘the kiss of life’; the fact that people can restore life through an act of love. However, this scene was not a depiction of Richard Curtis.

The man’s eyes were rolled to the back of his head, his face was swollen and mottled. As I got closer I saw that he was bleeding from his mouth.

The three of us indicated to the operator that we were hesitant to press our lips to his. Then she said something I will never forget: “It’s life or death: you decide.”

Although British law does not legally require a bystander to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the nature of a life-or-death scenario effectively eliminates any sense of choice – especially when the operator pronounces her words with such critical emphasis .

A few spectators had now gathered on the street above, craning their necks over my mother’s railing. I was writing for a well-known British soap opera at the time, but even we would have recoiled from such banal plot devices. The moment called for a hero.

I was determined it wasn’t me.

The argument that broke out between me and my brother was similar to the countless fights we’d had over who got to unload the dishwasher. And I knew he would make me do it, like he always did. By now, the once helpful passerby had become calcified with fear and could no longer utter words.

I realized it was going to be about me.

I’d like to say that my thoughts were with the man before me, the life he’d lived, and his family, but the truth is that I was thinking hard about myself, about whether I could face the guilt of not doing it. What does it mean to let a man die, when you had the chance to save him? Does karma exist? Would other people judge me?

Another overriding emotion was intense outrage. While serious drug abuse has always been a problem in my area, it has escalated in recent years. This incident followed a series of burglaries that affected my family, and an increase in other crime and drug-related activity in the area.

And now this, a man so drug-addled and brazen that he sees your house as a convenient place for a pit stop, a man who casually walks through your gate and sits down, smokes some nice crack and then overdoses. He had taken the complete p***. Anyway, in the end the fear of possible guilt prevailed.

Neither my brother nor I had any formal CPR training, so the operator talked us through it. What followed was one of the most unpleasant experiences I have ever had—and hopefully never will again.

I’ll spare you the details, but it lasted about 17 minutes, my brother pumping his chest and me spitting out his blood; and everyone was watching, including my mother.

Eventually I heard sirens, the medical crew arrived and took over [pictured above].

I was then assessed in the back of an ambulance. In the frantic commotion, I remember my mother rushing out of the house, empty shopping bags in hand, her face ashen, fleeing to the safety of Waitrose. Someone must have convinced her to reconsider as she accompanied me to the hospital, where I spent the rest of the afternoon undergoing blood tests. At 2:37 PM I texted my friend to tell him I wouldn’t make it to lunch.

Later that day, my neighbor came by to tell me that the man had survived, according to a paramedic he had kept in touch with. But any sense of satisfaction was overshadowed by the days of waiting for my blood test results, during which I had convinced myself that I was dying from a horrible blood-related disease.

Furiously, the hospital also refused to make the other man’s results public due to confidentiality laws. Despite my philosophy training, I could not convince them why it was ethical for me to have access to that information on this occasion.

Three days later I was given the all-clear. I can now say that I saved someone’s life. But there is something deeply appalling about what happened, and a symptom of a societal disease that NHS workers are acutely aware of. Like beachgoers who have just gone for a dip and find themselves being caressed by excrement, we are now reminded, often to our horror and disgust, of the alarming scale of this country’s decline.

I don’t know if the man would have been so lucky if the incident had happened today – as of February 2024, the ambulance response time for a Category 2 call (including suspected heart attacks) was on average 40 minutes and 6 seconds, which is well above the official target of 18 minutes. Given this, bystander CPR is now even more important.

If you are having a heart attack, you better hope there are well-meaning people around.

Getty Images, Mirrorpix, Alamy, Sachin Kureishi