Jeremy Clarkson has undergone a heart procedure after experiencing sudden health “deterioration”.
The Clarkson’s Farm host, who recently cut his professional ties with Grand Tour co-stars Richard Hammond and James May, has said a doctor told him he was “maybe” days away from dying.
Clarkson first started struggling while swimming from a boat to the beach while on holiday on a small island, explaining that: “It wasn’t far, maybe the length of two swimming pools. But when I finally reached the beach, there was more water in my lungs than there is in Lake Superior, and I was mostly dead.”
His worries were heightened when he struggled to walk up the stairs without holding somebody’s hand. He told The Sunday Times: “I’m not exaggerating. These problems all manifested themselves in one day.”
He returned to the UK and, after feeling a tightness in his chest and pins and needles in his left arm, he was rushed to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford in an ambulance.
Clarkson said that the “sudden deterioration” that “began to gather pace” left him especially concerned after the death of Alex Salmond from a heart attack earlier this month.
However, after having several checks, including an electrocardiogram (ECG), the presenter was told he was not having a heart attack – but that he was “maybe” days away from death.
Clarkson wrote: “It seems that of the arteries feeding my heart with nourishing blood, one was completely blocked and the second of three was heading that way.
“So he made a hole in my wrist, inserted his Dyno-Rod equipment and went in for a closer look. The question was this. Were the arteries so ruined that I’d need an emergency heart bypass? Or could he use his Dyno-Rods and some ultrasonic battering rams to loosen them up before inserting a stent?”
Clarkson said that “mercifully”, the doctor was able to insert a stent, which he said “wasn’t especially painful – just odd”.
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The presenter said the scary experience made him think, “Crikey, that was close.”
Last month Clarkson, Hammond and May left their show The Grand Tour behind on Prime Video.
Clarkson has continued to present Clarkson’s Farm, which covers him running his Oxfordshire farm, on Prime Video, as well as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on ITV.
He recently opened a pub, called The Farmer’s Dog, in Asthall, near Burford, close to where he lives near Chipping Norton.
Additional reporting by Agencies