The eighties singer Paul Young had a horror holiday accident in the Greek island of Santorini leaving him needing three emergency blood transfusions and intense surgery on his upper leg
Eighties pop star Paul Young has told of a horror holiday accident in Greece which left him with multiple fractures and in need of three emergency blood transfusions ahead of his tour.
The pop icon was less than a day into his holiday on the island of Santorini in September when he slipped and fell down a flight of outdoor hotel steps on his way to breakfast.
The 69-year-old told the Daily Mirror: “It had been spitting with rain. The going under foot, as they say, was quite good as I was walking on the flat, but when I got to the top of the steps, as soon as I put my foot on the first step, my leg slipped out from underneath me. I fell and my leg cracked as soon as I hit the step.
“Once I’d gone down, I couldn’t stop. There was no handrail, so nothing to hold on to. I just thought, ‘I’ve lost control’. I fell down to three or four more steps, fracturing my leg again and again. It was a multi-fracture.
“When I came to a stop, I looked down and my leg was in a slightly weird position, underneath my bottom. I thought ‘I don’t like that. My leg shouldn’t be like that’, so I tried to straighten it up and that’s when the pain started.”
Paul’s wife Lorna, 53, raised the alarm at the 5-star De Sol Hotel and Spa and Paul was rushed to Santorini General Hospital in Karterados. An X-ray found he had received a series of fractures to his left thigh bone.
He said: “All the multi-fractures were right at the top in the femur, the leg’s biggest bone, by the ball joint so it was very worrying. The fractures were so close to each other, there was a danger of the leg snapping. The only medication they had was paracetamol. I was screaming out all the time and most of the time I had my eyes shut because the pain was terrible.”
There were no surgeons at the hospital, so he lay on a gurney in the hospital’s corridor for nine hours while he tried to arrange a private flight to Athens so he could get urgent care.
He made it to Mediterranea hospital the next morning where he underwent surgery to have a metal rod inserted into the centre of his femur, secured by surgical screws at the top and bottom. But horrifyingly, Paul came-to while he was on the operating table.
He said: “I remember coming out of the anaesthetic because I remember thinking ‘I can feel this and it’s painful’. I could hear lots of banging and drilling going on but I couldn’t get the words to say anything. I think when they went into the leg, the procedure was not as easy as they thought it was going to be. They only had so much time and I think there’s a point where they can’t give you any more anaesthetic, so maybe [as the anaesthetic wore off] they had to rush to finish the job off.”
Paul said he was left with a “messy” wound and he spent the next two days in intensive care after badly haemorrhaging, leaving him needing three blood transfusions to replace the lost blood.
He said: “For the first few days, there was so much blood loss, they were changing the sheets every day. A lot of people were coming in to look at the wound and they were all speaking Greek so I didn’t know what they were saying. I was semi-delirious a lot of the time because of the blood loss. It was a frightening time.”
Paul was in hospital for a fortnight but returned home on a private plane while still suffering from anaemia. He had to fly below the 30,000+ feet altitude reached by commercial airlines to lower the risk of him suffering a life-threatening blood clot, which can develop at high altitude exposure.
He was in London’s private Cleveland Clinic for two days where he was monitored and given crutches to climb stairs before returning home to Dunstable in Bedfordshire. There he slowly built up strength and learned to walk again.
But he suffered a devastating setback in November when a bolt at the bottom of his leg rod snapped, causing the metal fixture to push downwards.
Paul said: “The pain was tremendous. I’d just started to feel like I was getting better. I was using just one crutch around the kitchen and had started to drive my car again. Then I woke up one morning in agony. I thought, ‘Why aren’t the painkillers working?’.”
Paul, who went through another 10 hour operation to repair the broken fixture, added: “I’ve never had something like this happen to me before. It’s the worst injury I’ve ever had.”
Paul is now off the crutches after five months of regular physiotherapy, hydrotherapy rehabilitation sessions plus daily resistance band exercises. But Paul can’t dance on stage and has no feeling in his left knee.
Nonetheless, he said he feels “quite positive on most things” and can reflect on the event with good humour.
He added: “I’m accident prone. I’ve done so many stupid things over the years. Once in Australia, I slid off the side of the stage and dislodged two ribs. On an American tour, I was on a quad bike in Antigua, hit some sand dunes, fell forward then my own quad bike ran over my back, fracturing two ribs. I just can’t believe that when I finally do get the biggest break of my life, I was simply going down to breakfast in Santorini!”
Paul said he feels “fighting fit and ready” for his upcoming nationwide tour, combining “conversation and acoustic version songs”.
Paul had a stutter in his youth, which knocked his confidence. He said: “In the early days, especially when I was tired, it really started to show itself, so I was a little bit reluctant to speak, which made me quite shy. Back then, I could never have believed I’d be able to do a solo talking show like this and the funniest thing? I’ve discovered that I’m actually pretty good at it!”
The star was a member of Streetband and Q-Tips in the 1970s before finding fame as a solo artist and becoming best known for tracks including Love of the Common People, Every Time You Go Away and Everything Must Change. Next month he will take to the stage with guitarist and close friend Jamie Moses for a double act.
Audience members will be invited to ask Paul “outrageous” questions at the end of each show as part of a Q&A session.
Recently Paul made comments on Gino D’Acampo, who stole multiple guitars worth £4,000 and a platinum record. But Paul said he absolutely agrees with forgiveness.
Paul married his wife Lorna, who runs his business, in a London registry office last July, three years after they got engaged. The couple moved in together in December 2021, just under five years after Paul’s first wife Stacey tragically passed away from brain cancer. Paul said finding Lorna was a “blessing”.
He said: “We’re very happy. We both lost partners at around about the same time. She lost her partner within a month of me losing Stacey, then it was about a year for both of us when we met. It was very slow. We just saw each other a few times, then it kind of slowly carried on from there.
“Lorna tries to cajole me into skin treatments but they take too long. I think having a steady amount of fun is good.”
Once one of the UK’s biggest music stars, Paul lives a quiet life five miles from Luton in the town he was born in. He said he can “see the sky” there.
After his UK show finishes in early June this year, Paul will head to America to tour with Australian-American musician Rick Springfield. Paul is hiring a personal trainer in preparation.
He said: “I’ve got a fitness girl coming in to make sure I’m able to get around. When I’ve got days off, and whenever I get back, I’ll be training. I’m just trying to do as much as I can.”
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
