Jeremy Clarkson has revealed that he recently underwent emergency heart surgery, including the insertion of a stent, after he was suddenly taken ill after returning home from holiday.
The star of The Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm, both huge hits on the streamer Amazon Prime, wrote in his column for The Sunday Times newspaper that he felt clammy, with a tightness in his chest and pins and needles in his left arm.
He wrote: “I certainly wasn’t having a heart attack. But if it hadn’t looked that way, I never would have been sent to hospital.”
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The TV farmer added that a few days before, while on holiday in the Indian Ocean, he had had to “take a moment to make sure my limbs were working properly” when he stood up, “struggled” with swimming, and could not descend a flight of stairs “without holding someone’s hand.”
“These problems all manifested themselves in one day, which made the rest of my holiday extremely relaxing because all I did was sit in a chair drinking wine and eating cheese,” he wrote.
“Back at home, though, the sudden deterioration began to gather pace. I woke on Wednesday morning not feeling too good. I was clammy and there was a tightness in my chest.”
He was taken by ambulance to John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where a heart attack was ruled out after he underwent checks. He then had fitted a stent – a tube inserted into a blocked artery to open it and allow blood to flow.
“The next morning I went home, and here I am, two hours later, writing this and sort of thinking, ‘Crikey, that was close.’”
Clarkson and his co-presenters James May and Richard Hammond brought their successful Grand Tour series to an end in September. The trio previously presented the BBC motoring show Top Gear. Clarkson’s Farm has delivered four hit series, with a fifth possibly to come according to Clarkson’s hints recently.
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