A MALDON dad given just 48 hours to live has said thank you to an air ambulance team after he made a remarkable recovery.

Michael Pratt, 60, had been at work in Witham in April last year when he fell six feet from the back of a lorry.

Mr Pratt hit his head leaving him with several skull fractures and putting his life in jeopardy.

Herts Air Ambulance was sent to the scene and put Mr Pratt into an induced coma for his own safety before flying him to the Royal London Hospital.

He said: “Just before the accident happened I remember thinking, if I hold on I’ll be ok.

“But obviously I couldn’t because I fell. I can’t remember falling or anything after that until I woke up from an induced coma in hospital three weeks later.”

Mr Pratt’s family were told to expect a different man as a result of the head injury, but as time went on and Michael began to recover, the impact of his injuries were not as life-changing as first thought.

“When I woke up I was blind in my right eye and almost deaf in my right ear. I had terrible tinnitus and I couldn’t walk because I had been laid up in bed so long,” Mr Pratt said.

“When I spoke I thought I made sense but my family told me later they couldn’t understand anything I was talking about.

“Just over a year on and I’m now working two days a week again, though I can’t drive in my job anymore, I have reduced sight in my right eye and reduced hearing in my left ear, which is better than before. I have lost my sense of smell and I suffer terribly with fatigue.

“But all of that is good considering the hospital only gave me 48 hours to live.”

Earlier in August Mr Pratt, along with his partner Kay Broadway and mum Joyce Wynter visited the Herts Air Ambulance Air Base in North Weald to meet and say a personal thank you to Simon Probert and Naomi Pritchard who attended to him on the day.

Mr Pratt added: “It is thanks to the hospital and to the Herts Air Ambulance that I survived that fall and have come out of it with just these side effects.

“The Air Crew did a brilliant job to minimise the damage to my brain by putting me into an induced coma at the site of the accident.”

In June this year Mr Pratt’s mum Joyce took part in the Air Ambulance Royal Afternoon Tea initiative and hosted her own Afternoon Tea, raising £371.30 for her local life-saving Air Ambulance.