At the age of 33, 10 days after giving birth to her first child by emergency caesarean, Tanya Shadrick almost died – twice. Once in the back of an ambulance; and then again in hospital, as medics fought to save her from a massive arterial haemorrhage.

In each moment she was consumed with regret that she hadn’t done what she’d wanted with her life; that she hadn’t been brave enough.

Waking up two days later from an induced coma, she resolved that the next time she was on her deathbed, she wouldn’t be flooded with the same shame. She would stop sleepwalking through her life.

“It’s viscerally painful to know you never even tried,” she says.

However, Shadrick didn’t chuck it all in there and then to pursue her dreams and change her life. Instead, she chose the arguably more difficult road. She stayed where she was, and patiently waited for her time to come.

Her story is the opposite of those lauded in bestselling books; Cheryl Strayed’s Wild or Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, books that were popular at the time and that Shadrick loved too.

Instead she chose the stoical route. Staying by her husband’s side to raise their son, and even having a second child. While she was consumed with family responsibility, she never lost sight of her end goal: to become a professional writer.

Today, aged 48, with her children aged 15 and 13, she has achieved that goal and written a book about her journey. But were it not for her near-death experience she says she would never have been brave enough to have dared to do so – and insists that it’s never too late to change your life.

“Society reveres success in youth, because it is wonderful. In literature we have Sally Rooney now, Jeanette Winterson in the 1980s, and when I was young, Zadie Smith. They worked furiously hard at a time when most of us didn’t know what we wanted to do. But their success can relieve us of the burden to be brilliant ourselves. They’re almost a different category. They’re not like us, so we don’t have to be brave. But I think there are lots of interesting stories about people doing things later in life.”

Shadrick is a thoughtful, poetically articulate interviewee. Her vantage point is one that she tells expressively in her debut book, A Cure for Sleep.

It’s ambitious in its scope, a memoir telling her journey from rural working-class Devon to where she is today.

In many respects Shadrick had already achieved a lot when she almost died in her early 30s. The first from her family to go to university, she took a first-class honours degree in English from the University of Sussex. She and her husband, whom she met at university, had a shared love of poetry and books. She dreamt of writing, but after they fell into stable jobs – she in student recruitment, he in IT – in their 20s, creative ambition became quietly quelled by happy domesticity.

“Somehow we let it go and we hid in nesting and decorating and DIY magazines. By the end of our 20s we’d let those bigger ambitions go and put all our energy into housekeeping, which I think a lot of people do. I really wasn’t resenting what I was doing.”

And then the haemorrhage happened.

“In the ambulance I felt this regret about my wasted life. And then I fell into this glimmer of a place. I’m not religious and I don’t know if it was God or the blood loss. Suddenly I came back and I didn’t know why I couldn’t see or there was this pain in my throat. I’d been intubated.”

In the hospital, Shadrick suffered a second near-death experience and was put into an induced coma for two days.

“When I came round I had this leaden feeling. The realisation I was back in my body. I’d not merged with the universal. I was in this body that had had two major operations and a baby. Everyone seemed to think I’d want to breastfeed, but all I wanted was to be left alone for a month and have all my meals brought to me. I didn’t want to be a mother right then.”

When she first came round, Shadrick says she really wanted to leave the life she was living behind her. But she knew she couldn’t.

“I decided to make that my first measure of coverage. Of course I wanted to run away when I came back to life. I wanted to have the backpack on and to be gone. The book Wild had just come out and it’s a wonderful book and rightly famous. The same with Eat, Pray, Love. I admire those women and love those books; but I’d been abandoned by my father as a child and my early life had been constrained and defined by it. It’s such a haemorrhage of energy and I looked inside myself and knew I couldn’t do that to my own family.”

So Shadrick chose to stay. “Not as a martyr. And not as a parent who puts their unlived lives on their child. I think that’s unforgivable.”

She raised her children with her husband and kept her job, but found small outlets for her creativity. The task she set herself was to change her life while still being a mother in a small town, showing up for the people who depended on her.

“Most of adult life is about earning money and paying bills and looking after the children and your elders, that’s what we would do if we were decent people. But that tiny percentage that’s left over, how do you use that in a fairy-tale fashion?”

Shadrick approached a local hospice and suggested the idea of becoming a scribe for the people there who wanted to tell their story. She started to participate in her local community in Lewes, and she started writing. Not a book, but anything that came to mind. She filled notebooks; she wrote letters to herself from the perspective of her being an old woman.

“I was just throwing off effort and energy. I became someone like a musician or a dancer, eventually I got the muscles.”

The idea came to her to approach her local lido, where she regularly swam, and asked to be their writer in residence. Sitting in public she wrote on scrolls of paper as long as the 164ft pool. “I wrote “laps”. It took far longer than I could have expected: two years, 2015 and 2016.”

The result was the Wild Patience scrolls: a mile of writing composed beside England’s oldest outdoor pool. A magazine photographed her, she appeared on Radio 4 and was invited to be an artist-in-residence at extraordinary locations including the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland and Virginia Woolf’s garden on the Sussex Downs. She earned a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts.

Reflecting on arriving where she always wanted to be, living as a writer, Shadrick says: “To really change your life takes patience and always takes longer than you think. The actual change is really slow. But you’ve got to let things in. You’ve got to let life surprise you in order to know what you’re capable of. And, of course, most of us don’t let life in.”

But for her near-death experience, Shadrick thinks she would have carried on working as the head of student recruitment at the University of Sussex until she retired: a job she enjoyed, but one which would have kept her in her comfort zone.

Shadrick wonders if her story is one for her generation. But she thinks that it’s a universal and timeless struggle, the desire to reach one’s potential but also to have safety and security. “It is really hard to find a way of making our cathedrals inside ourselves. We’ve all got these huge feelings and social media doesn’t help. It allows us to talk about ourselves all the time, but it’s not the same as communicating what you really care about.”

What you care about doesn’t have to be the same as Shadrick. “It could be netball, or flower arranging. It’s so exciting when you remember what you cared about and you find an adult form for it.

“You don’t have to go off on a big trek, you don’t have to have a hero’s journey. The Homeric can be quite small.”

Her story has even inspired her mother, who in her 80s has left an unhappy marriage and is forging a new identity and exploring new interests.

“For decades she’d used these stock phrases: ‘It’s not for the likes of me’; ‘It’s too late for me’; ‘I’ve wasted my life’. That dark self-punishing talk that we hear around us all the time.

“And then she started to make some big and difficult choices about who she is. And to be doing that at 80 is amazing. It’s hard enough at 40 or 30.”

Shadrick doesn’t know what her own future holds, or even if she would like to write another book. “But I’m pretty sure that when I die I won’t feel the painful regret of my first death. And that’s what this was all about.”

The Cure for Sleep by Tanya Shadrick is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99