Chris Tarrant has revealed he was terrified he was going to die or be left paralysed after suffering a stroke – in one of his first TV appearances since the incident.
The ‘Who Wants To Be a Millionare’ host was flying from Bangkok to London in March last year when he realised he was seriously ill and was left "completely" terrified and scared.
Asked whether he thought it was the end, he said: "Yeah. I did think, If I go to sleep I won’t wake up.
"Don’t have a stroke at 32,000 feet in the air on your way home from Bangkok.
"It was completely terrifying, it was really scary.
"The first sign was as I was getting on the plane and I slipped a bit, and I actually thought it was cramp. I was filming and I’d come all the way from Bolivia to Burma and I did a long old stint and I was pretty wrecked. I sort of keeled over before I got on and they said, ‘Are you alright Chris?’ I said, ‘Yeah I’m alright, only got a bit of cramp’ and I got on the plane."
"Then it kept coming and going like that. So every hour the leg would go for about 20 minutes, I just couldn’t lift it. The leg wasn’t working."
Chris didn’t alert the aircrew because he was desperate to get back to Britain.
He explained to ITV’s ‘Loose Women’: "Thai Airlines, they didn’t speak the best English. I thought, ‘What are they gonna do? Is there a doctor on the plane? What’s he gonna do?’ I just wanted to get home, I wanted to be in Britain. If you think about it, coming from Bangkok, I wanted to get to London. If they said we had to take the plane down, where are we gonna go? Pakistan? Syria? Where are we gonna go?"
The 68-year-old star star eventually landed at Heathrow airport and was whisked to Charing Cross hospital in London and "pumped full of drugs".
What’s more, upon being discharged, Chris’ doctor said he was "lucky" he wasn’t left wheelchair bound.
Chris said: "The doctor said, ‘You’re really lucky’, and I said, ‘Yeah I could have died’. But he said, ‘No you could have ended up in a wheel chair’, and that really scared me."
Chris Tarrant: I was scared I’d die
