Martin Roberts said he watched as doctors used a syringe to remove a “dark red black death liquid” which had been stopping his heart from working.
The 58-year-old TV presenter, who has spent almost two decades at the helm of Homes Under The Hammer, went to hospital in April with chest pains before discovering there was a serious issue.
Appearing on ITV’s This Morning, Roberts said: “I’d been feeling a bit poorly, under the weather for a couple of weeks.
“I’ve had a few chest infections over the last few years and I’ve had asthma since childhood, so I’m used to quite a tight chest.
“As it approached the Easter bank holiday weekend, it was starting to get really bad, where I could hardly walk without struggling for breath.
“The confusing thing about this is that it gets you in the breathing side of things, so you don’t think it’s something to do with your heart.
“It looked like it could have been the symptoms for long Covid, real lethargy, a tightness in the chest, pain in the chest, difficulty breathing, so you pause it and pause it and by the time it got to just after the bank holiday weekend, I was starting to be delirious, putting letters the wrong way round.”
Undated Handout Photo of Martin Roberts
PA Features Archive/Press Association Images
The TV star, who appeared on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2016, said he ended up in the Royal United Hospital in Bath where he was told the sack around his heart was “filling with liquid”.
He said: “By the time they got to me, my kidneys were at 30%, my liver was at 30%, my lungs weren’t getting the oxygen and at any point, I could have had a heart attack.
“The heart would have been strangled by itself. We’re talking minutes/hours of life left here.”
Roberts said “you just put your life in the hands of professionals” when asked by ITV presenter Rochelle Humes what was going through his mind at the time.
He added: “I’m lying there in the specialist cardiac drain unit, there’s a special operating theatre and there’s a local anaesthetic.
“I’m watching as they stick a tube into the side of your heart and then with a big syringe, he starts pulling this dark red black liquid, which is almost, I call death liquid, pulls it out and squirts it into a plastic beaker, pulls another one and squirts it in and I was just watching.”
At the time, Roberts shared a video on social media, recorded from his hospital bedroom, sharing the news that he could have had hours to live had the liquid not been removed.
Despite his health scare, Roberts said he will start filming Homes Under The Hammer again in a few weeks and would like to carry it on.
“I’ve got to get to 20 years. Hopefully I’ll get some nicer properties and they’ll cherry-pick the good ones, rather than the really bad ones,” he said.
