WHMP radio personality Chris Collins recovering after near-death ordeal

"Look, I'm not dead," said Chris Collins from his home Tuesday, as he sought to dispel rumors that suggested that very thing. "I'm also not brain-dead, blind, or any of the other things people have heard."

Of course, Collins, 43, who had been WHMP's news and program director since 2001 before his major organs shut down, was at death's door all summer and not expected to pull through. All of it brought on, he said, by a decade of burning candles at both ends and playing "fast and loose with Type 2 diabetes for years. I was riding for a fall."

He also strongly relates to the tail-end of "The Sopranos'" run, where Mob boss Tony, in a coma after being shot by his uncle, goes into this altered state as a harried heating salesman from Arizona, Kevin Finnerty. Collins can tell you about comas.

And talk about a shell of one's former self. In the last six months, between kidney failure, a three-week coma and open heart surgery, Collins has involuntarily shed 116 pounds, which puts him roughly at his 1986 fighting weight of 212, when he was the goalie for Greenfield High's hockey team. Not that he's in any shape to start lacing 'em up and taking his place between the pipes. But he's alive. Which may be some sort of a modern miracle in itself. "My nurses couldn't believe I was alive," he said.

Collins' ordeal began in late March, with intense pain in his back. Since he had been rushed to the hospital 2½ years before with what turned out to be kidney stones, he thought he was in for more of the same. But this time it proved to be a blocked right ureter, which led to a kidney infection. "My kidneys basically stopped functioning," he said. "It came out of the blue - I never saw this happening."

Co-workers at WHMP who saw him taken by ambulance to Cooley Dickinson that morning suspected it was a heart attack.

Renal stents were inserted to allow Collins' kidneys to function. He was sent home to recuperate, but the drug regimen he was prescribed had adverse affects. "I had (the stents) in for three months," he said, "but the bloating - I bloated like a mile-high balloon. Couldn't sleep, could barely walk upstairs; it was obvious that something was wrong. My echocardiogram was high but normal, but my symptoms were not consistent with that," he said.

An ambulance's wail could be heard once again in Collins' ears. "The last thing I remember is being wheeled into the Franklin ER.," said Collins. The paddles of a defibrillator shocked his heart back to life and again when he was rushed to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield. Collins credits cardiologist Mara Slowsky with saving his life. "She saw that my heart was beating at 15 percent capacity. Major blockage. They drained 2 liters of fluid out of my chest."

He went into a coma - from late July to mid-August he was on extreme life support. "I coded three times and three times they brought me back," said Collins. "It was hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute."