Youngs, 34, has heart operation after collapsing in Tigers training
ENGLAND’S MOST CAPPED PLAYER UNDERWENT THE PROCEDURE TO CURE CONDITION
ENGLAND’S most capped player Ben Youngs has undergone heart surgery after collapsing during an open training session at Leicester Tigers.
The 34-year-old scrum-half, pictured, who won 127 England caps before his international retirement last year, was diagnosed with arrhythmia and supraventricular tachycardia, a type of irregular heartbeat that causes the upper chamber to beat fast or erratically.
Youngs, speaking on his podcast For the Love of Rugby, said he hopes to be back in action for the start of the Premiership season in September.
In conversation with his cohost and Tigers team-mate Dan Cole, Youngs said: “I’m on the mend, I’m recovering.
“You know when we joked around on the pod quite a while back, and we had this open training session at Leicester, and I said I was doing fitness, and basically I collapsed.
“Well, not collapsed, but I had to stop and lay down as my heart was pounding away, and the rain was hitting me in the face, and I sort of rolled my head to the side and looked at all these admiring fans – 30 of them – that were all packed out in the main stand at Leicester.
“And I thought: ‘This is it, this is how I’m gonna go.’
“I basically had a few of these episodes and I’ve had it my whole life.
“And it can just kind of spontaneously happen at any stage of your life or career.
“And so I’ve had it my whole life, unknown to me.
“I’ve had a couple of episodes throughout my career, but have always been checked up and we get the best medical care.
“The club have been amazing as they so often are with anything like this.
“I got checked the first time it happened, [then] a second time it happened again.”
After being fitted with a monitoring device in his chest, with a communications link to the hospital, Youngs experienced another incident when he was running on a treadmill.
He said his heart-rate rose to “just over 200 beats [per minute], but it’ll be totally out of rhythm, out of sync. And it feels pretty horrible”.
This left Youngs feeling “incredibly lightheaded”, but the communications link to the hospital confirmed his diagnosis.
“It’s a good thing this happened during the offseason, because I can get fixed and the recovery time is not long at all,” he said.
“I’ll be fine for the start of the season.”
Youngs described himself as “sedated but awake” for the twohour operation in Birmingham, which relied upon doctors triggering an episode by bringing his heart rate to 250 beats.
“There’s a 90 per cent success rate, so I should not now suffer,” Youngs said.
“My ticker should be all good and it won’t suddenly kick in and go mental. Rugby aside, it’s probably a good thing it’s been caught now.
“Imagine in like 10 years’ time, you’re just having a kick-around in the family with the kids or the grandkids and something like that happens.
“It’s sort of panic stations, whereas actually, we’re fortunate to be exposed to good medics and it’s been able to be looked at now for a long-term health thing.”