James Taylor, the former Nottinghamshire and England batsman, has revealed how close he came to dying after announcing his sudden retirement last month because of a heart condition.
The 26-year-old subsequently had ARVC [Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy] diagnosed, the same condition that struck down Fabrice Muamba, the Bolton Wanderers midfielder, during a game with Tottenham Hotspur in March 2012.
“They said: You’ve effectively done the equivalent of six marathons in five hours
Nottinghamshire thought initially that Taylor had picked up a virus during a pre-season tour of Barbados. But alarm bells started to ring when he suffered an irregular heartbeat before the second day of a warm-up match against Cambridge University on April 6.
Speaking to Sky Sports’ Ian Ward, Taylor divulged the shock he felt knowing that his cricket career was abruptly over, his fears for his life and his hopes for the future outside the game.
“It makes for quite an entertaining story, now I’m alive,” Taylor said.
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“The ironic thing is I probably felt as good as I have technically and mentally. I had my morning net, felt great and then did the warm-up. Towards the back end of the warm-up I turned to Brendan Taylor and said my chest isn’t feeling great.
“I thought it might be a bit of anxiety. I started to feel my chest and it wasn’t just my rhythm, the tempo was really high.
“I did a few more basic throws and then I went inside. It was about four degrees, really cold, and I knew something was wrong when sweat from my head was pounding the floor, I was proper wet though.
“That’s the first time I thought I was going to die. I stuck my head down the toilet, which wasn’t pretty. My body was packing up but I tried to hide it from the guys. They just thought I was ill. It was in quite a public area so I was conscious enough not to let others see what was going on.
“We went into the changing room and was put on oxygen. I wasn’t looking too much, I was just feeling it but ... I could see my heart out of my shirt.”
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Taylor recounted how he was driven home, where sweating, vomiting and feeling uncomfortably cold he was seen by a doctor after his girlfriend phoned for medical help without Taylor’s knowledge and against his wishes because he was “too embarrassed” to go to hospital.
The doctor told Taylor to go to hospital, and once there it quickly became clear that it was wise to have done so.
“When I went in I was sick everywhere again. The nurse saw me straight away, hooked me up to something and then took me straight through to wherever it is the serious stuff goes down,” Taylor said.
“The sound of the machine was 265 beat per minute. Four beats per second. The curtain of the ward opened and all the doctors came flooding in. That’s when I thought ‘this is serious’.
“[The doctor] turned to me and said: ‘Did you walk in here?’ They said it was a miracle I was still standing. They said: ‘You’ve effectively done the equivalent of six marathons in five hours,’ with what my heart had done.”
““I was in hysterics when they told me, aged 26, that I couldn’t do what I love
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Taylor spent 16 nights in hospital and paid tribute to the NHS staff who gave him “unbelievable” treatment and ultimately saved his life.
“I feel every beat in my chest,” he said. “ That’s why I try to talk and try to do a few more things now, rather than just resting. I’m hyper sensitive and paranoid about it.”
Having returned home, the enormity of events began to dawn on him as he was bombarded by messages of support from the general public and those in the sporting world, including Muamba.
“Sometimes I do have negative thoughts. Sometimes I’ll be lying in bed and thinking ‘if I dropped down now, I wonder what they’d say’,” he revealed.
“Those messages of support were unbelievable. It was like I’d died but I was lucky enough to read the messages that people have sent to me. Usually it’d be about my cricket and what I’d achieved or messed up again and this time it was about me as a person.”
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Taylor, who played seven Tests and 27 one-day internationals for England, will no longer be able to play the game he loves but it is likely that he will be offered opportunities to stay around cricket with Nottinghamshire.
“I was in hysterics when they told me, aged 26, that I couldn’t do what I love and fulfil my dreams,” he said.
“Even though it’s the worst possible situation for me, if I can get something good out of it that’d be brilliant. It’s probably my proudest moment, battling through something I should never have battled through.”