Former England scrum half Ben Youngs has revealed that he underwent heart surgery after collapsing in front of fans during a Leicester Tigers training session.
Youngs, England most-capped male player, was diagnosed with arrhythmia and supraventricular tachycardia and had an operation a hospital in Birmingham after a worrying incident earlier this year.
The 34-year-old retired from international rugby at the conclusion of last year’s World Cup and hopes to be back in time for the new Premiership season, which starts on September 20.
“I’m on the mend, I’m recovering,” Youngs said on the For The Love of Rugby podcast, which he co-hosts with England prop and Leicester colleague Dan Cole.
“You know when we joked around on the pod quite a while back, and we had this open training session at Leicester, and I said I was doing fitness, and basically I collapsed.
“Well, not collapsed, but I had to stop and lay down as my heart was pounding away, and the rain was hitting me in the face, and I sort of rolled my head to the side and looked at all these admiring fans – 30 of them – that were all packed out in the main stand at Leicester. And I thought: ‘This is it, this is how I’m gonna go.’
“I basically had a few of these episodes and I’ve had it my whole life. And it can just kind of spontaneously happen at any stage of your life or career. And so I’ve had it my whole life, unknown to me.
“I’ve had a couple of episodes throughout my career, but have always been checked up and we get the best medical care. The club have been amazing as they so often are with anything like this. I got checked the first time it happened, [then] a second time it happened again.”
Youngs did not feature for Leicester at the end of the last Premiership season, though made a playing return off the bench for the Barbarians at Twickenham on June 22.
He had been fitted with a monitoring device on his chest on an earlier visit to the hospital, before a session on a treadmill trigged his heart-rate to rise above 200 beats per minute and “out of rhythm”.
“It’s a good thing this happened during the off-season, because I can get fixed and the recovery time is not long at all,” Youngs explained. “I’ll be fine for the start of the season.
“There’s a 90 per cent success rate, so I should not now suffer. My ticker should be all good and it won’t suddenly kick in and go mental.
“Take rugby aside, it’s probably a good thing. It’s been caught now, but like, imagine in like 10 years time, you’re just having a kick-around in the family with the kids or the grandkids and something like that happens.
“It’s sort of panic stations, whereas actually, we’re fortunate to be exposed to good medics and it’s been able to be looked at now for a long-term health thing.”
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