‘The Vultures Stopped Circling and Swooped Down for a Closer Look’

Updated: 21-10-2024, 05.16 PM

“The Grand Tour” host Jeremy Clarkson has revealed he was “days away” from death after suffering symptoms similar to a heart attack.

The 64-year-old was on vacation in the Indian Ocean earlier this month when he experienced a number of symptoms such as loss of strength in his limbs, “acres” of pain after he “belly flopped” off a boat, and a newfound difficulty swimming and climbing the stairs.

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“It was there, on day four, the vultures stopped circling and swooped down for a closer look,” the Clarkson wrote in his weekly Sunday Times of London column, adding that he spent the remainder of his vacation sitting in a chair “drinking wine and eating cheese.”

Upon returning home, however, the “Clarkson’s Farm” star’s condition deteriorated further and he was displaying signs of a heart attack. “I was clammy and there was a tightness in my chest. Naturally, I ignored these things and, after loading 30 pigs into the slaughterhouse school bus, I noticed that I had pins and needles in my left arm.”

Clarkson quickly took himself off to a hospital where he had blood tests, an ECG and X-rays done and doctors concluded that he wasn’t having a heart attack but one of the arteries to his heart was “completely blocked” and a second was “heading that way.” Asking the doctor whether death (which he euphemistically refers to as “bankruptcy”) was “just around the corner,” the physician replied “Maybe.”

He was soon carted off to an operating theater to see whether he would need a heart bypass but in the end was only given a stent (a tube in the arteries to keep them open) and sent home the next morning.

“Here I am, two hours later, writing this and sort of thinking, ‘Crikey, that was close,’” he concluded.

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