William Regal talked about how he spent eight weeks in hospital at the end of 2018 after contracting sepsis in his leg, during an appearance on Chris Jericho’s podcast:
“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.”
Regal then discussed other health issues over the years:
“You know I’ve had a lot of heart trouble at different times. And since 1998, I got Pericarditis, and Pericarditis is an inflammation of the sack around your heart, and what it does is scar that sack. So your heart can beat, but that sack can kind of lock down. But because I always – it might not have looked like I trained as hard as I did – but I always did all the squats, always breathing, always taking bumps in wrestling, it kept that from locking down and going solid. There’s a skin around your heart, your Pericard. Well I went to India and got really sick, still nobody knows what that was. I was off for a year – I came back and a few months later it hit me really bad and I was off for a year.”
“This is another story. And so I’d had bouts on and off right? At the same time, now I know I’d been wrestling with a broken neck since 1993. From the first year I came in America, the firs time I won the WCW Television Title, I was on with Ricky Steamboat, I’m 25 years old, and you can actually watch this. The finish is me giving him a German Suplex, and if you watch – you know I can fall into a bridge – I land and you can see it clear as day if you watch this right now – you see my neck… my head hits, and my neck just goes to the side, and it went ‘crack’. And all my arms went dead, and it was never right after that. It was never right, but it sort of went it better, it went away. And what I used to get a lot was all this spasming in my left trap, and my neck would get stiff, but I always bridged and did all that stuff, right?So I ended up having my neck done in 2014, that was the end of my wrestling career. In 2013, I wasn’t wrestling that much, I was winding down, doing a lot of commentary, whatever I was doing with NXT, which was all great. And I knew my time was… you know, I was beat up. I worked it out – if you take away the last few years of my career, take away when I say I started the first year, so go from 1994 to when I finished, apart from a year being out, a few times off – and I took very little time off with some major injuries, you just never never said anything, just didn’t do it – and a couple of suspensions, I wrestled solidly for a minimum of 150 days a year. Minimum, for 26 years. You (Jericho) were smart because you used to take a couple of years off every now and then… you had other… well I don’t have any other interests or anything else going on and it was always that thing that was drilled into me. I always thought, ‘If I can just get a 20 year career’, I was in wonderland.”
