I woke to a flash of flames. It was around 3am.

There are things I barely remember and things I would rather forget. Here’s what happened. I ran back into the burning house to save my dog.It’s still a trauma that I didn’t make it. But here’s the other trauma: had I made it, I’d be dead too.

I woke to a flash of flames. It was around 3am. Smoke. Fire. Explosions. I was at Dad’s place, the house he and Mum built in 1961.

I remember Dad getting out and safe. And then I had to go back for Miss Maudie. She was at the front of the house, trapped and terrified in the dark because the power had blown. Windows and bottles and heaven knows what else were exploding with frightening roars as the heat and smoke engulfed us. The only light we had was the torch on my phone.

Dad, 84 and with emphysema and a recent veteran of major lung surgery and a quadruple heart bypass, made it out to the back deck in pyjamas and bare feet. He struggled about in the dark to find a safe place. I ran back in to save the dog.

That’s the last thing I remember.

I was, according to the firies who found me, unconscious and nearly dead in the hall. Had I made it to Maudie – who had taken shelter in a bathroom – I’d be dead, because I would have had to run through the fire. And another minute or two in the smoke would have killed me.

My last memory is the scald of the most intense heat imaginable. I think I screamed. If I didn’t, I should have. I still remember and feel that terrifying heat.

Maudie died. I lived. So did Dad. They found him in the dark out the back, after they found me and they told him: “We found the bloke at the front. Come with us.” They carried him out to the street, where they were trying to revive me. I salute the ambos, who out on the street made sure I would live before they took me anywhere.

We lived to tell the tale, which is one of great good fortune as well as great sadness.

The home Dad and my late Mum had built was burned beyond salvation, the result of an electrical fault with a power board, the investigators said. It was demolished just before Christmas. Dad, losing his home of 60 years, took all this in remarkable and admirable stride.

I spent weeks in induced comas. Three comas, and apparently they don’t like putting you in the second one because it often doesn’t end well. I was in a very bad way. Lungs shot. Kidneys failing. My insides were smoked and screaming.

On the first morning, and many mornings after, they thought I might not survive. I was at the Alfred in Melbourne. They put me in high-level ICU — where you’re not just unconscious, but these days a COVID risk. You don’t go into normal ICU until they clear you as COVID-free.

Outside, the phones were ringing. Some family and friends first learned of it on breakfast television, who had the run-of-the-mill overnight fire cameras out the front of the house, or heard it on morning radio, where the unusual street name gave it away, and the call chain began. They thought Maudie might have run away, so siblings and cousins and friends took to the streets looking for her.

But later that morning, back at the smouldering home, they found her. She was dead in the bathroom. She didn’t have a burn on her. The smoke would have taken her quickly. The smoke is the killer: my hospital records tell me I even had cyanide poisoning, a common result of house fires.

You don’t expect to face such things — the heat, explosions, the terror that your Dad might die, that you might die saving your dog, cyanide poisoning and what in the almighty hell is going on — outside of a movie. Or a story you read that makes you shake your head and think: Thank God that wasn’t me. Over the years, I’ve written more of those stories about other people than I can count.

The first thing I remember after that is a few weeks later — October 18 — and speaking to my sister, Caroline, on a phone handed to me by a nurse.

“It’s my birthday,” Caroline said.

I had no idea then that she’d been at my bedside almost every day, when she was allowed. When she said it was her birthday I knew the date, even if I was confused about almost everything else.

Good God, I thought. What had happened in the meantime?

I remembered there’d been a fire, but then … nothing.

“Has anyone looked for Scout?” I asked.

Scout was the dog I had before Miss Maudie. I had it in my head then that Scout must have run away. Scout had died in sad circumstances in 2017.

I now know we had this conversation many times. The doctors told Caroline not to tell me the truth because I was too delusional to retain that or any other information. Then one day, as I started to turn the corner, I was on a speaker-phone call to the family and asked: “I wonder what happened to little Maudie?”

I cried. Surely not. Surely she’d have run away from the fire?

But I knew this bit was true. Of course she hadn’t lived. It was the slow dawn of reality.

That is my broad memory of the conversation — there were many conversations like this, where I was not at all with it. I am reflecting them here as I remember them, for better and mostly worse.

At one point I imagined I had skipped hospital and caught a plane to China. At another, I was in Bali, wearing bandages and explaining them away like a con-man in a cheap movie. Doctors would come to my bedside and ask if I knew where I was and what had happened to me. In reply, I’d tell them that I had been in a fire but in these fantasies, I was rarely at the Alfred Hospital. I was in Shanghai or Denpasar. I met one of those doctors a couple of months later and he smiled and shook his head and said: “Boy, you were in a bad way.”

Oddly, I did remember one thing very clearly: COVID lockdown.

For all my fantasies that I had absconded to China or Bali, I also imagined that I was going to have a hell of a time getting home from China and Bali, due to pandemic restrictions. I fretted over how I would explain myself to the authorities and my family. I berated nurses and doctors. One night, I insisted I was expected at a party and that a taxi was waiting. I was very sorry, but I had to leave now. Old habits die hard. I tried to rip my tubes out. They prevailed and kept me where I was.

At other times I was calm. I remember the night of the AFL grand final and me and the nurse conjuring a better TV connection in the ward so we could watch it. That really happened. The Tigers won another flag.

When I regained some sense of sanity, they still wouldn’t let me have a phone or computer in case I tweeted a bunch of mad things.

“That ship has long sailed,” I thought, thinking back on my decade on Twitter.

I’m glad they deprived me of my phone, because any posts might have been filled with madness. But I knew one thing, and I told them so: I want my phone back by November 3; if you stop me watching the US presidential election I will riot.

I couldn’t really walk. I remember the first day the physio came to my bed and asked me to stand up, and my legs went out from under me. Shit, I thought; I might not be able to walk again. This was melodramatic; I just needed to teach my legs to walk again, and soon enough they did, though walking up and down stairs for the first time was terrifying.

For a good while I felt that I was about to topple over. I couldn’t eat much. I was on the tubes for fluids and food for a long while, and I still have problems swallowing. Smoke and fire damage to the insides is a brute; for all the burn scars I have outside — on my head and chest and arms — the bruises linger inside more than out.

I missed things.

People who know me well, and even those who don’t, were upset. Not just that I was in a coma, but that I was in a coma when Donald Trump caught COVID, and that I was not awake to witness and write about it. This remains a sadness for me, a Trump tragic. I still see headlines and stories from that month and realise I had no idea it happened. I’m irrationally sad about that fly that landed on Mike Pence’s head, which I only learned about in December. A man of little substance, I love cheap jokes.

That makes it hard to write about this and to answer the question: what does it all mean? To come within a minute or two of dying and knowing you are here by some combination of a complete fluke and the brilliance of some brave firefighters and wonderful doctors and nurses? What if that fire engine had arrived two minutes later? What if they’d first gone to the back of the house rather than the front?

What if they’d passed out or fallen unconscious in the inferno themselves, before they got to me?

Here’s the disappointment. I have no idea what it means. I live with it every day, and it does put everything else in perspective, but if I think about it too much I have to force myself to stop thinking about it because there are roads it takes you down that hurt like fire.

But there is much to be said for rebirth — for thinking of what else is possible, and how little some things matter.

And to celebrate new dawns. And how some little things matter.

When my catastrophe happened, a phone and text and social media chain of family and friends grew.

Amidst the news of my possible demise came the idea that if I lived, they couldn’t imagine me without a dog. My friend Monica scoped the nation, amid the frenzy of COVID dog adoption when puppies were hard to find. In remote outback Queensland, in a little place called Byrnestown, population 34, she found a litter of puppies about to be born and told the breeder my story.

The puppy was likely unconscious around the same time that I was. As she was born, her four siblings died. She was revived, the litter’s sole survivor. Janet, the breeder, promised her to me. And four days before Christmas, she arrived down south on a plane.

But what to name her? Scout had been named for my favourite character in literature, the boisterous young hero of To Kill A Mockingbird. When Scout died and a new puppy arrived, I continued the tradition: she would be Miss Maudie, after Scout’s wise neighbour in Harper Lee’s masterpiece. I’m reminded that in that book, Miss Maudie’s house burns down while Scout watches in the dark, covered in a blanket. When it came to naming this new puppy, I went from literature to real life.

My Aunty Nellie was a Queenslander, a courageous woman, a political pioneer in the ALP and a survivor. Caroline suggested we call the new puppy Nellie Belle. And so we did.

Nellie Belle is a joy and a tonic. Going at full puppy pelt, she deprives me of time to think too much about what just happened, and reminds me of what might still be possible. Most days I call her Maudie at least twice, and Scout at least once, but that will soon pass.

Lives and hearts move on, and find new ways forward.