You might be surprised to learn that fighting for your life for month after month with tubes stuck in all sorts of painful places and nurses draining fluid from your lungs – not to mention doctors asking to drill a hole through your skull to remove a piece of your brain – is not the worst thing that can happen.

It’s the bit afterwards that hurts most, according to Nigel Smith. The bit when it suddenly dawns on you that you’ll probably never be quite normal again.

Six years on from the brink of death, Nigel looks surprisingly well when we meet. I have been warned that he slurs his words, but if he does it’s imperceptible.

“People do call me things in the street sometimes,” he says. “My foot used to be very twisted out, and this middle-aged man once came up to me in the middle of town and said, very gently and calmly: ‘You’ve left your foot out, mate.’ He was just being cruel.

“And you get people who push a trolley into the back of your legs when you stop in the supermarket. I mean, I’ve got a stick for God’s sake.”

On the other hand, there is no shortage of kindly pensioners who try to help him across the road. “I once had this tramp offering me money because I looked worse off than him.”

He has good days and bad days, and this is clearly a good day. We’re sitting in the sunshine outside a studio in west London. Not far away, actors Josie Lawrence and Neil Pearson are about to resume work on Smith’s latest radio play, Vent. It’s about a man in a coma, and never can a writer have taken the Method style of research so seriously.

Life was going rather well for Smith in November 2001. True, he’d recently been made redundant from his job at Carlton television, where he was in charge of developing new sitcoms. On the bright side, though, there was interest from the BBC in a medical comedy he was writing and, best of all, his wife was expecting their first child together.

The only thing that was bothering him, in fact, was an unusual numbness down his left side. It was the first sign of the neurological illness that would leave him in hospital for five months. During that time he contracted MRSA; he had a tube inserted into his stomach because he couldn’t swallow; he stopped breathing and had a tracheotomy; he suffered a morphine overdose, and the steroids he was given to stop his brain swelling caused such bad hallucinations that he once thought he was appearing with Les Dennis in Celebrity Squares.

“Every time I thought ‘it can’t get any worse’ it did,” he says.

Five years later he still feels pain on his left side. But he has managed to write a blackly humorous book about his ordeal, along with Vent, and is working on an ITV sitcom with Ade Edmondson.

Most people emerge from life-threatening illnesses full of platitudes about “marvellous” doctors and nurses. What is remarkable about Smith’s book is its warts and all style. He certainly gives grateful credit where it is due, but he also describes pen-pushing indifference, incompetence, and some members of the caring professions who were deliberately unpleasant.

Here he is on nurses. “No one who has spent any length of time in hospital has any illusions about angelic nurses,” he writes. “Some are good, some incompetent, a few cruel, a handful brilliant, but almost all are competent but indifferent. And know what? Whisper it, but their pay is good. Better than mine. Overtime is lucrative, private work more so. They’re doing less and less hands-on work and wouldn’t pick up a J Cloth if their lives depended on it.”

And if the tone is a blackly comic romp when it describes Smith’s time in Charing Cross hospital, it gets much darker and angrier when he is discharged into the care of the Wolfson rehabilitation centre in southwest London.

“Living as a disabled person when you’ve been healthy is a very difficult adjustment to make,” he says. “Fighting for your life is kind of easy. The people I really take my hat off to are people struggling with long-term disability because they just go through battles all the time.

“If you think it’s tough inside hospital, well, it’s tougher outside because that’s when the care really stops. You just get forgotten about.

“You pester, and they hope you go away. Well, I just don’t go away. I’m a writer: I’m used to rejection. If anybody thinks I’m just going to bugger off, they are sadly mistaken.”

When he first came home, he needed help to wash. Now he has a carer who comes to his house in Hastings, East Sussex, to help with the household chores he can’t manage, ensuring he and his wife, Michele, a theatrical agent, can still work.

Smith, now 42, grew up in Darlaston in the West Midlands. As a child he wanted to be a pilot, but after studying English at Queen Mary college, London, he became a reporter on the Dagenham Post. “I did the crime beat – every week there’d be a head in somebody’s garden.” Tiring of the heads, he bought a clapped-out white van and took a guitar and two friends busking around Europe.

Encouraged by an American girlfriend, he gave up busking to write plays in New York and on the back of that returned to London and got himself an agent, who found him a job as a comedy script reader at London Weekend Television. His career since then has been a mixture of writing, producing and finding comedy talent.

He began by writing episodes of The Bill, but eventually found himself producing a comedy festival for Channel 4. This was such a success that he was poached to become head of comedy development at Carlton.

Although he was made redundant not long before his illness, he was already working on the sitcom that would become Doctors and Nurses, co-written by Dr Phil Hammond and shown on BBC2 in 2004.

“I’ve made my life normal by going back to work,” he says. “I think if you don’t want to be treated as disabled then don’t act disabled. I was out of the wheelchair quite quickly because I knew that if I could walk, my lungs would clear themselves and I could get some exercise and I could get into places and do things on my own.

“The thing about being disabled as opposed to being critically ill is you’re never on your own. I was in a wheelchair and couldn’t wheel myself. So there was always somebody there. You’re never on your own.”

His hard-won relative good health comes and goes. “I was almost hospitalised last week with a bad bout of pneumonia but I refused to go to hospital. I don’t like it. My veins are like Keith Richards’s after a bad night out, so unless you’re an expert at finding a vein in my body you won’t find one. What I’ll get in hospital is a junior doctor going bodge, bodge – and I’ll get MRSA again.”

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