The legendary William Regal was officially released from his WWE contract back on January 5, and now he’s working in AEW as the manager of Bryan Danielson and Jon Moxley.
We noted a few weeks back how Regal dismissed a report on how he was dealing with serious health issues, and noted that he’s as healthy as he’s been in years. Jericho’s new “Talk Is Jericho” interview with Chris Jericho has been released, and in it Regal talks about how his family recently got together for Christmas for the first time since 2018, and then he detailed the health issues he’s experienced in recent years, including why he was once given 24 hours to live.
Regal said the following:
“Once I was released – I went home two weeks before Christmas. The reason being, which we might get to, the last time my family were all together was 2018 for Christmas, and I was in hospital for eight weeks. I was given at one point 24 hours to live, I had sepsis in my leg, they were gonna cut my leg off. This is January 4, 2019. So I insisted on going home for Christmas, because you know I’ve been through a lot. I had a hell of year 2018… sorry, it’s a bit, like, I usually just tell people, but now I’m sat with you and I’m comfortable, things hit you a little bit…
“November, they send me for a scan, because I’m not… my legs are swelling, and they do a scan of my abdomen. And luckily, fortunately for me, there’s 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 again because you’ve already been…’ – this was Friday – ‘…already been injected, so, we need to do another scan, but we can’t do it now, because you can only do one’, because of the fluid.
“Come back Monday, I go back Monday, I get a scan that I’ve never had before. Some type of scan. I went home, within an hour of me being in the house, my cardiologist called me going, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry’. I’m going, ‘Why? Why? Why?’. He said, ‘We should have thought about this years ago’, he’s telling me all these things, ‘It doesn’t pick up on a regular scan’, I’m going, ‘What? What? What?’. 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 – it looks like a goose egg. It was completely constricted, it had just grown into a solid lump of rock.
“They’ve cut me open, and there’s wrapping on it at the beginning, he’s wrapping at this goose egg with a scalpel and he’s going ‘tap tap tap’, and 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 get this off now, I would have six months to go. So they had to take it off, right, it’s called a Pericardectomy, it’s a very rare operation. There’s only a few people that can do that. Fortunately, WWE got me a doctor in Atlanta that can do this for me.
“I was eight weeks in hospital after that, this is November 23 I think. I insisted on coming out at Christmas because our Bailey (his son) was back from England and it was right before he went to Japan. He was supposed to start in Japan in April. And our Bailey come back, and he was home. He was living in England and wrestling in England, and he come home, and I went, ‘I’m coming home for Christmas’, for the first time in my life, I always used to shrug stuff off, I thought, ‘I’m not gonna make it. I’m gonna die’.
“This is about four weeks in, I had fluid leaking constantly out of my legs, I was swole up like the Michelin Man, I was laying on a bed for about four-and-a-half weeks, I had a drip in both arms, I couldn’t move, literally couldn’t move, I was cramping up because they were giving me diuretics to try and take the fluid out, but cutting my sodium down, and I was just cramping up from head to toe, but I insisted on going home. I had to struggle out and have a nurse come in.
“By New Year’s… I woke up in bed, my wife’s trying to do her best, and I’m insisting on staying out of hospital, but they’re going, ‘No you’ve got to go’. I was screaming the house down. I just cramped from literally my eyelids to my toes and I fell out of bed and on the floor. My wife couldn’t move me, our Bailey come in and me other son, and picked me up off the floor, and (audibly tears up), and they got an ambulance and I was just completely cramped up, got me back in hospital.
“So finally I got through, and the only way I can remember it is, I thought I was gonna die. It was really bad. And it was January 4, somehow I got sepsis in my leg. Again, this is all things that happen to me. I don’t believe in anything, but something gets me through this stuff. January 4, my wife gets a call, 3 O’Clock in the morning, this is a Sunday night because it wasn’t the normal doctors – weekend doctors, ‘You’re husband’s got sepsis in his leg, we’re gonna cut his leg off, and he’s got probably 24 hours to live if we don’t’.
“It’s madness. This doctor who was looking after me, his wife is 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’s had a Pericardectomy… 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, this and this’, and somehow, that saved… because they weren’t gonna do it. They were gonna chop my leg off. That worked, and saved my leg.”
Stay tuned for more from the Regal interview.
Follow Marc on Twitter at @this_is_marc. Send any news, tips or corrections to us by clicking here.