William Regal Was Told He Needed An Amputation Or Had 24-Hours To Live
AEW's William Regal recently spoke with Talk Is Jericho in an emotional interview where he opened up about his health issues.
Regal revealed how one doctor saved his life by noticing a particular situation during a scan that needed to be looked at.
"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," he said. "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. 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, within an hour of me being in the house my cardiologist called me saying, '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.'"
William Regal then revealed what the doctor told him. The former NXT General Manager was given just six months to live, which was due to a serious issue with his heart. The sack around it had calcified around, causing him a major problem.
"He said, 'you've probably got less than six months to live.' What had happened was this sack around my heart had completely calcified, it looked like a goose egg. It was completely constricted, it had just grown into a solid lump of rock," he claimed. "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."
Another major health issue that William Regal had to go through took place after that because he ended up with sepsis. This resulted in the doctors planning to amputate one of his legs. However, by good fortune, a doctor overheard the situation and ended up helping him.
"I thought I was going to die, it was really bad," he admitted. "It was January 4th, somehow I got sepsis in my leg. Again, this is all things that happened to me, 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, 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."
Regal then recalled the moment that he knew things would change. Something just switched inside of him, and he knew that he was going to be fine. This led to him pushing to get himself out of the hospital.
"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."
If you use any quotes from this article, please credit Talk Is Jericho with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.