Comic Susie McCabe on how having a heart attack has inspired her new stand-up show


One of Scotland's leading stand-ups has revealed her next live show will draw on her life-changing experience of having a heart attack less than a fortnight before she was due to appear at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Glasgow comic Susie McCabe will recall how she was rushed to hospital after experiencing chest pains, her determination to return to performing and the lifestyle changes since the health scare last summer.
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She will be launching her new show, Best Behaviour, at the King's Theatre as part of the Glasgow International Comedy Festival in March.
One of the fastest selling cards at the event in recent years, McCabe was honoured at last year's festival when she was named the new winner of a new "spirit of Glasgow" award named after Sir Billy Connolly and also recorded a one-hour show for BBC Scotland.
However her preparations for a full run at the Fringe were disrupted when she took ill after performing a warm-up show in Bristol in late July.
McCabe, who had got married the previous year, was with her brother when she took ill, spent two days in an intensive care unit, where she was told she had suffered a heart attack and would need urgent angioplasty surgery.
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Hide AdMcCabe, who credited the Bristol Heart Institute with saving her life, immediately gave up smoking and started going to the gym after rethinking what she has described as a "reckless lifestyle".
McCabe, who was allowed to return home to Glasgow after three days in hospital, said: "They were fine with me doing the Fringe as long as I could control my nerves.
"I kind of explained to the hospital that most of the work on my Fringe show is done between September and March, when it gets taken apart and put back together.
"I told them I wasn't going to Edinburgh to work up a show. It was already written, it was ready to go and I had a whole lot of ticket sales.
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Hide Ad"I just completely focused on the show. Every other gig I would have done at the Fringe like 'Best of the Fest' just went in the bin. I just felt that God didn't save me to sit in the house."
McCabe said her new show would reflect on how her life "has had to change" since her heart attack, but also how much “daftness and ridiculousness” she encountered in the aftermath of her health scare.
She added: “I will be looking at how this is the first time in my life I’ve had to consider my own mortality, what that means for you and what that also means for the people around you.
"It's about how you are viewed and the lens you are viewed through - by your people, by your city and by your country.
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Hide Ad"It is a very interesting thing when you start to think about how we Scots react to these types of things.
"The show looks at the absurdity of life when you have to look at your own mortality. But there's no sadness in it. There's a lot of pathos, a lot of humanity and a lot of laughs.”
McCabe suggested her new show would also look at the sharply contrasting experiences men and women have when they go into hospital.
She added: "I talk about going from a room of your own into a shared ward.
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Hide Ad"If you're a woman going into a shared ward it's like going into prison.
"Within the first 10 minutes, it's like: 'What are you in for?'
"Men don't speak to each other in hospital. They can be in for six months and only two questions will be asked: 'Are you done with that paper?' or 'Do you have Sky Sports on your phone?' That's it, that's men. They don't even ask each other's names."
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