Doctors at St. Paul’s Hospital needed to be sure Mike McLellan’s new, state-of-the-art defibrillator implant would work. So to test it, they stopped his heart.

The 44-year-old Squamish man’s heart was jolted back to life – and he became the first patient in B.C. to have the next-generation technology that can restart a heart without even touching it.

“Technically I lost about 15 seconds, where they killed me. I flat-lined, and bam! They reset it to make sure it works,” recalled McLellan.

“I’ve been working on a good story on that but I haven’t totally nailed the white light part.”

McLellan had been diagnosed with a cardiac arrhythmia – a condition that, if untreated, can result in a sudden stop of the heart, which leads to sudden death.

He is a fit, active sports wholesaler who coaches sports and has three kids. A traditional pacemaker would have resulted in invasive surgery, where a wire would have been placed in the veins of his upper chest.

And because the heart moves as it beats, the wire would have been constantly stressed and would have broken at some point – meaning more surgery.

“It was pretty scary. Definitely a real sense of my own mortality,” McLellan said.

Doctors saw him as a candidate for a new procedure that would put a cellphone-sized defibrillator under his arm, with a wire implanted under the skin.

“The major advantage is that the wire is not inside the heart. The wire is implanted under the skin. The generator for the device sits under the muscle, and the heart is sandwiched in between,” said heart surgeon Dr. Jamil Bashir.

“The electrodes can sense if the heart is fast. It knows it has to deliver a shock,” he said. The shock goes through the chest and restarts the heart.

McLellan did his research, and agreed.

“I was the guineapig. First guy in B.C. I had amazing doctors and they did an amazing job,” he said.

McLellan went under the knife about a year ago.

The hospital has now implanted 18 more of the devices, Bashir said. They cost about $20,000 each, but St. Paul’s is studying whether a higher up-front cost means more savings in the long run. Nearly 1,000 conventional defibrillators are implanted in patients each year in BC.

The defibrillator is visible underneath McLellan’s shirt, and his kids have taken to calling him a nickname, after the device inside Marvel Comics’ Tony Stark.

“My kids have nicknamed me Iron Man,” he said.

An apt nickname – only a few months after the surgery, McLellan had recovered fast enough to go on a 650-kilometre bike ride in four days.

He said he could barely feel it – and is looking forward to a similar ride next year.