William Regal Recalls Nearly Having Leg Amputated In 2018, Being Told He Had 24 Hours To Live

In a recent interview on Talk Is Jericho, William Regal dealing with health issues in 2018, nearly having to have his leg amputated, and much more. You can read his comments below.

William Regal on dealing with health issues in 2018: “I don’t know exactly the time frame, but it’s November, and they send me for a scan because my legs are swelling, and they do a scan of my abdomen. Luckily, again fortunately for me, there is a cardiologist in the room. And this lady saved my life. She went, ‘Hang on a minute, there’s something above that, that doesn’t look right.’ But they couldn’t scan there because you’ve already been injected. ‘We need to do another scan, but we can’t do it now.’ You can only do one. I go back Monday, I get a scan that I’ve never had before, some type of scan. I go back Monday, I went home and within an hour of me being in the house, my cardiologist called me going, ‘I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry.’ I am going, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘We should have thought of this years ago,’ He’s telling me all of these things, ‘it doesn’t pick up on a regular scan.’ He said, ‘You’ve probably got less than six months to live.’ What had happened was this sack around my heart had completely calcified, my heart looked like a goose egg. It was completely constricted, it had just grown into a solid lump of rock. I have the picture which I can show you where they’ve cut me open and he’s wrapping on this goose egg with a scalpel. It’s going, ‘tap, tap tap.’ Then three hours later, you can see where he’s peeled it all off, you can see a completely beating heart. If they didn’t take this off now, I would have six months to go.”

On nearly having to have his leg amputated and doctors telling him he had 24 hours to live: “I thought I was going to die. It was really bad. It was January 4th, somehow I got sepsis in my leg. Again, these are all things that happened to me, and something gets me through this stuff. My wife gets a call, three o’clock in the morning, ‘He’s got sepsis in his leg. We are going to cut his leg off, and he’s probably got 24 hours to live if we don’t.’ It’s like madness. The doctor who was looking after me, his wife was a doctor. She was on call, she overheard because they’re not allowed to talk to each other about cases. She overheard a conversation that there’s a fella who had a pericardectomy. Which again, when I was in hospital, it was like the Elephant Man, if you’ve ever seen that movie. They were bringing people in all the time to look at me. I am like creamed, and all these doctors were coming in to stare at me. Because you don’t see this thing, right? So, she heard this and called her husband at home. Woke him up, and said, ‘They’re about to chop his leg off.’ He called them, and said, ‘Inject him with this, this, this, and this.’ They weren’t going to do it, they were going to chop my leg off. That worked and saved my leg.”

On his recovery process: “I am lying in the hospital bed. Now when you have open-heart surgery, it’s pretty painful. On top of all these other things, right? So, two days before the NXT UK show from Blackpool were Walter debuted. I am in the hospital and something in my brain just went, ‘Click.’ And I thought, ‘I’m going to be okay.’ I don’t know what it was, something just went, ‘You’re going to be okay.’ Then it was just for the next two weeks trying to get out of the hospital because if you’re in the hospital, I hate to say as wonderful as people are, you’re going to stay sick. You need to get out and get yourself healthy if you know how to. After two weeks, I got out and watched the UK tournament on the bed. It was the first time I let Dave Taylor come see me. I couldn’t let him come because you know how much he makes you laugh. I was in so much pain. I felt good enough to say, ‘Why don’t you come over and we can watch this tournament?’ We watched the tournament and I’m texting with [Triple H]. Within a very quick time, I was walking three miles a day. Within two months, I was doing 500 squats again.”

If using any of the above quotes, please credit Talk Is Jericho with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.