Abdullah719
T20I Captain
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2013
- Runs
- 44,826
By James Taylor
In the first of our exclusive extracts from his autobiography 'Cut Short', former England batsman James Taylor relives the day in April 2016 a routine pre-season match at Cambridge University ended his career - and left him fighting for his life.
In the grand scheme of things, I would never have imagined that a University match against Cambridge would mark the end of my career and dictate my entire future life.
It was the morning of the second day, and we were going through our normal routine at Fenner’s, playing volleyball football and a few catches and throws.
I’d thrown a few balls when I started to feel a little bit anxious. My shoulder was sore – a hangover from the World Cup a year previously where it had been causing me anxiety about throwing. Now I was anxious again.
My chest started to feel tight. Out of nowhere, my heart was really thudding. I thought it might be anxiety, but that usually subsides. This didn’t. I turned to my teammate Brendan Taylor. “My ticker’s f----d,” I told him. “My ticker’s f----d.”
I walked off to the changing rooms. My heart was now going what felt a million miles an hour. I could actually see my chest moving, my skin expanding and contracting, fit to burst. It looked so unnatural. It made me feel sick to see it.
By the time I got into the changing rooms, I was really starting to sweat. It was a freezing cold April day but rivers were dripping from my face. I was incredibly uncomfortable, a stranger in my own skin.
I lay down on the physio bed but I was really struggling to breathe. I was gasping for air, sucking it in. I was feeling so, so sick. I made it into the toilet and stuck my head in the pan, desperately trying to vomit. Nothing would come.
Nottinghamshire physio Jon Alty dragged me out. It hadn’t been flushed and was no place for anyone to be putting their face. I was trying to tell him about my heart but I could barely breathe. I just wanted to pass out. That would be a way of escaping it. I really did think I was on the way out.
I went next door into the cold dark changing rooms and as I lay down on the hard wooden slats of the benches, Alty gave me oxygen and checked my pulse by hand and also put a pulse oximeter on the end of my finger to check my vital signs. My pulse reading was up from normal but not off the scale. But to me this wasn’t equipped to deal with whatever was happening in my body. “F--- what it says,” I said, “feel my heart!”
By lunchtime, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to play and it was thought best if I headed home with our overseas player, Jackson Bird, who wasn’t playing that day.
About 25 minutes out from Nottingham, I woke up with a start. “S---. I’ve got no house keys.” I rang my mum, who only lived half-an-hour away and had a spare set, and told her I’d meet her at Trent Bridge.
The only people at the ground were the office ladies, and, lovely as they were, I didn’t really feel like going to say hello to them. “Hi! I’m dying! How’s things with you?”
I just needed to get inside the pavilion and get my head down again. I curled up at the bottom of the stairs to the lunch room. As I lay there, I must have made for a piteous sight. Just a few weeks earlier I’d been scoring runs and taking miracle catches for England in South Africa. Now I was a hunched, grey, hollow figure on the verge of death.
My mum had never negotiated the corridors of the pavilion but somehow found me in a ball at the foot of those stairs. She was shocked to see how ill I was and, like any mum, her first instinct was to look after me. She took me home, just half a mile up the road, and I staggered through the door before lying down on the settee.
By 4pm, I was feeling progressively worse and getting pains down my left arm. Looking back, it’s obvious – it’s the sign of a heart attack. Not me, though. My remedy was to try to give myself a bit of a massage. It didn’t last long. I knew I had to go and be sick. I made it to the bottom of the stairs and shuffled up on my hands and knees. I crawled into the toilet and was sick repeatedly, five times.
I shouldn’t have been alive at that stage. With my body concentrating all it had on my vital organs, my stomach was already giving up. I felt so terrible – pain, nausea, my heart smashing out of my chest – that going back downstairs wasn’t an option. I crawled into bed and pulled the duvet over me.
My girlfriend - now wife - Jose had come home by this point, and she came up to me and rang the doctor. Jose described my symptoms and he didn’t hesitate. “Take him straight to hospital. Don’t wait for an ambulance.”
Mum dropped us outside A&E and Jose and I walked up to reception. She was speaking to the receptionist, but I knew I was going to be sick again. I staggered into the toilet, and was sick repeatedly until nothing more could come.
As I came out, a doctor saw me. By this time I was grey. She immediately took me and Jose into a little assessment room. She lifted my top, put pads and wires on my chest and took a look at the screen. I didn’t see her face but I knew something fairly remarkable was happening.
More doctors were called and when they saw the results, that was it – they took me straight through to where the real action happens, a more serious set-up, a big cubicle – resus. They sat me up and immediately hooked me up to a heart monitor.
The sound it made was like nothing you’ll ever hear. A cavalcade of beeps, fast ricocheting around the room. It was the sound of my heart, charging, careering, thundering. A runaway train trapped within my ribs. The machine said it was pounding at 265 beats a minute. The doctors looked at one another. Strangely, it’s the little things you notice at a time like that, and the expression on their faces – shock, disbelief – is something I won’t forget.
The blood results came back at record speed. When the heart is under stress it releases an enzyme called troponin. Under no stress, the amount of troponin in the blood would be zero. My level was 42,000. Unsurprisingly, at that point they concluded I’d had a severe heart attack.
First priority was to get my heart out of its abnormal rhythm. “There are two options,” they told me. “We pump you full of drugs and hopefully that works, and if it doesn’t, we put you to sleep and shock you out of it.”
I didn’t like the sound of the second one. “Well, if the drugs work,” I told Jose, “there’ll be no need to shock me.” And yet after the drugs were administered, nothing happened. And all the time that awful sound of the machine in the corner racing.
In the end, they called the anaesthetist to put me to sleep but, seconds before they arrived, my heart rate plunged from 265 to 60. The machine was making just a steady ‘beep, beep, beep’. It was the best noise I’d ever heard.
And then I was sick everywhere. My heart might have been back to ‘normal’ but the rest of my body was screwed. It had put everything into saving my heart and other areas had suffered. I was a matter of seconds from my kidneys failing and my entire digestive system had pretty much stopped.
Medical personnel were swarming in from all sides to make further investigations. One of them asked, “How did you get in here?”
“We just walked in.”
“You walked in here?” I don’t think she thought we were thinking straight. “That’s impossible. You couldn’t have. Not like this.”
One of the doctors stood there open-mouthed. They asked how long I had been suffering.
“It started about half past 10 this morning.”
“What?”
It was utter astonishment. “What you’ve been through is the equivalent of running six marathons.”
My sheer fitness had saved me. Anyone else wouldn’t have had a chance.
Emotionally, I’d kept everything in check for the whole day. As I lay down to sleep, though, it all became too much. The day, my heart, the future – there were so many unanswered questions, so much to deal with. It was the first time I’d ever felt real fear. Raw unbridled fear.
Jose lay next to me and I held her close. “This isn’t good,” I whispered. “When are we going to get out of here?” She no more had the answer than I did. Her life had been tipped upside down, shaken around, and she’d come hurtling into this strange new world just the same as me.
“We’ve still got me and you,” she hugged me, “and that’s all that matters.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket...-see-heart-stretching-skin-thought-going-die/
In the first of our exclusive extracts from his autobiography 'Cut Short', former England batsman James Taylor relives the day in April 2016 a routine pre-season match at Cambridge University ended his career - and left him fighting for his life.
In the grand scheme of things, I would never have imagined that a University match against Cambridge would mark the end of my career and dictate my entire future life.
It was the morning of the second day, and we were going through our normal routine at Fenner’s, playing volleyball football and a few catches and throws.
I’d thrown a few balls when I started to feel a little bit anxious. My shoulder was sore – a hangover from the World Cup a year previously where it had been causing me anxiety about throwing. Now I was anxious again.
My chest started to feel tight. Out of nowhere, my heart was really thudding. I thought it might be anxiety, but that usually subsides. This didn’t. I turned to my teammate Brendan Taylor. “My ticker’s f----d,” I told him. “My ticker’s f----d.”
I walked off to the changing rooms. My heart was now going what felt a million miles an hour. I could actually see my chest moving, my skin expanding and contracting, fit to burst. It looked so unnatural. It made me feel sick to see it.
By the time I got into the changing rooms, I was really starting to sweat. It was a freezing cold April day but rivers were dripping from my face. I was incredibly uncomfortable, a stranger in my own skin.
I lay down on the physio bed but I was really struggling to breathe. I was gasping for air, sucking it in. I was feeling so, so sick. I made it into the toilet and stuck my head in the pan, desperately trying to vomit. Nothing would come.
Nottinghamshire physio Jon Alty dragged me out. It hadn’t been flushed and was no place for anyone to be putting their face. I was trying to tell him about my heart but I could barely breathe. I just wanted to pass out. That would be a way of escaping it. I really did think I was on the way out.
I went next door into the cold dark changing rooms and as I lay down on the hard wooden slats of the benches, Alty gave me oxygen and checked my pulse by hand and also put a pulse oximeter on the end of my finger to check my vital signs. My pulse reading was up from normal but not off the scale. But to me this wasn’t equipped to deal with whatever was happening in my body. “F--- what it says,” I said, “feel my heart!”
By lunchtime, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to play and it was thought best if I headed home with our overseas player, Jackson Bird, who wasn’t playing that day.
About 25 minutes out from Nottingham, I woke up with a start. “S---. I’ve got no house keys.” I rang my mum, who only lived half-an-hour away and had a spare set, and told her I’d meet her at Trent Bridge.
The only people at the ground were the office ladies, and, lovely as they were, I didn’t really feel like going to say hello to them. “Hi! I’m dying! How’s things with you?”
I just needed to get inside the pavilion and get my head down again. I curled up at the bottom of the stairs to the lunch room. As I lay there, I must have made for a piteous sight. Just a few weeks earlier I’d been scoring runs and taking miracle catches for England in South Africa. Now I was a hunched, grey, hollow figure on the verge of death.
My mum had never negotiated the corridors of the pavilion but somehow found me in a ball at the foot of those stairs. She was shocked to see how ill I was and, like any mum, her first instinct was to look after me. She took me home, just half a mile up the road, and I staggered through the door before lying down on the settee.
By 4pm, I was feeling progressively worse and getting pains down my left arm. Looking back, it’s obvious – it’s the sign of a heart attack. Not me, though. My remedy was to try to give myself a bit of a massage. It didn’t last long. I knew I had to go and be sick. I made it to the bottom of the stairs and shuffled up on my hands and knees. I crawled into the toilet and was sick repeatedly, five times.
I shouldn’t have been alive at that stage. With my body concentrating all it had on my vital organs, my stomach was already giving up. I felt so terrible – pain, nausea, my heart smashing out of my chest – that going back downstairs wasn’t an option. I crawled into bed and pulled the duvet over me.
My girlfriend - now wife - Jose had come home by this point, and she came up to me and rang the doctor. Jose described my symptoms and he didn’t hesitate. “Take him straight to hospital. Don’t wait for an ambulance.”
Mum dropped us outside A&E and Jose and I walked up to reception. She was speaking to the receptionist, but I knew I was going to be sick again. I staggered into the toilet, and was sick repeatedly until nothing more could come.
As I came out, a doctor saw me. By this time I was grey. She immediately took me and Jose into a little assessment room. She lifted my top, put pads and wires on my chest and took a look at the screen. I didn’t see her face but I knew something fairly remarkable was happening.
More doctors were called and when they saw the results, that was it – they took me straight through to where the real action happens, a more serious set-up, a big cubicle – resus. They sat me up and immediately hooked me up to a heart monitor.
The sound it made was like nothing you’ll ever hear. A cavalcade of beeps, fast ricocheting around the room. It was the sound of my heart, charging, careering, thundering. A runaway train trapped within my ribs. The machine said it was pounding at 265 beats a minute. The doctors looked at one another. Strangely, it’s the little things you notice at a time like that, and the expression on their faces – shock, disbelief – is something I won’t forget.
The blood results came back at record speed. When the heart is under stress it releases an enzyme called troponin. Under no stress, the amount of troponin in the blood would be zero. My level was 42,000. Unsurprisingly, at that point they concluded I’d had a severe heart attack.
First priority was to get my heart out of its abnormal rhythm. “There are two options,” they told me. “We pump you full of drugs and hopefully that works, and if it doesn’t, we put you to sleep and shock you out of it.”
I didn’t like the sound of the second one. “Well, if the drugs work,” I told Jose, “there’ll be no need to shock me.” And yet after the drugs were administered, nothing happened. And all the time that awful sound of the machine in the corner racing.
In the end, they called the anaesthetist to put me to sleep but, seconds before they arrived, my heart rate plunged from 265 to 60. The machine was making just a steady ‘beep, beep, beep’. It was the best noise I’d ever heard.
And then I was sick everywhere. My heart might have been back to ‘normal’ but the rest of my body was screwed. It had put everything into saving my heart and other areas had suffered. I was a matter of seconds from my kidneys failing and my entire digestive system had pretty much stopped.
Medical personnel were swarming in from all sides to make further investigations. One of them asked, “How did you get in here?”
“We just walked in.”
“You walked in here?” I don’t think she thought we were thinking straight. “That’s impossible. You couldn’t have. Not like this.”
One of the doctors stood there open-mouthed. They asked how long I had been suffering.
“It started about half past 10 this morning.”
“What?”
It was utter astonishment. “What you’ve been through is the equivalent of running six marathons.”
My sheer fitness had saved me. Anyone else wouldn’t have had a chance.
Emotionally, I’d kept everything in check for the whole day. As I lay down to sleep, though, it all became too much. The day, my heart, the future – there were so many unanswered questions, so much to deal with. It was the first time I’d ever felt real fear. Raw unbridled fear.
Jose lay next to me and I held her close. “This isn’t good,” I whispered. “When are we going to get out of here?” She no more had the answer than I did. Her life had been tipped upside down, shaken around, and she’d come hurtling into this strange new world just the same as me.
“We’ve still got me and you,” she hugged me, “and that’s all that matters.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket...-see-heart-stretching-skin-thought-going-die/
- big loss to the game. He was very pleasing to the eye.
