Jeremy Clarkson has revealed he underwent emergency heart surgery after waking up with chest pain and pins and needles in his arm. Reflecting on the scare, the TV presenter, 64, admitted: “Crikey, that was close.” His health took a turn for the worse during a holiday on an island in the Indian Ocean.
During the trip with his actress girlfriend Lisa Hogan, 51, the ex-Top Gear host noticed he had to “take a moment to make sure my limbs were working properly” and struggled to swim the equivalent of two lengths of a pool. “I was mostly dead,” he wrote in his Sunday Times column. “I’ve never struggled with swimming before, and now, suddenly, I can’t do it any more.
Nor could I descend a flight of stairs, not without holding someone’s hand.” He spent the rest of his break eating cheese and drinking wine. Back at home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, the Clarkson’s Farm star said the “sudden deterioration began to gather pace”.
‘I woke on Wednesday morning not feeling too good. 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.
” Clakrson wrote that “for some reason Alex Salmond – whose bankruptcy arrived very suddenly last week – popped into my head” and he was prompted to call for a doctor. The former Scottish first minister died from a heart attack aged 69 while he was in North Macedonia f.