“I knew I had to get me and my poor little girl back home, so I left the car there and got on the train with a huge suitcase. As soon as we pulled into London, I went straight to the hospital, where they decided to call the MRI operator back into work.
“It was just as well she did, because it turned out I’d had an abscess that had exploded in my colon, deep in my large intestine, and it had caused all sorts of chaos. You know the phrase ‘busting a gut’? That’s what it was. I’d literally busted a gut.”
Whitehouse soon realised how dangerous things had become as he was rushed into surgery, revealing in the interview that there was an extremely “high fatality rate” which accompanies the condition, with 40 percent of people not making it.
“Despite the horrendous pain, the vomiting and the near-constant internal examinations, it turns out I was actually one of the lucky ones. The doctor even told me a couple of times, ‘How you’re still here, I don’t know’ – which is right up there in the list of things you don’t really want to hear a medical professional say to you when you’re not well,” Whitehouse continued to say.