Paul Young has detailed a horrifying accident that left him requiring three emergency blood transfusions.
The 69-year-old singer is best known for being the frontman of bands Kat Kool & the Kool Cats, Streetband and Q-Tips before he pursued a solo career in the 1980s.
However, he recently had a close call after falling down a flight of stairs while on holiday.
The singer was walking to breakfast at a hotel in Santorini when his 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,’ he told The Mirror.
After Paul’s wife Lorna, 53, frantically looked for help, he was rushed to hospital.
Recalling what happened in the aftermath of the accident, which occured in September, Paul said it was discovered 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,’ he continued.
As there were no surgeons there to operate, Paul had to sit on a gurney in a corridor of the hospital for nine hours while trying to organise a private flight to Athens for urgent medical attention.
Although he was able to then have surgery, Paul then spent two days in intensive care after badly haemorrhaging. He also needed three blood transfusions to replace the lost blood.
The significant blood loss left the bed sheets needing to be changed ‘every day’ with Paul describing the experience as ‘frightening’.
Two weeks later he returned to the UK on a private plane, which had to fly lower than commercial airlines to reduce the risk of a life-threatening blood clot. He was eventually able to return home to Bedfordshire and had to learn to walk again but also faced one of the bolts in his leg rod snapping.
Calling the pain ‘tremendous’ Paul then faced another 10-hour operation.
Nearly six months on, he’s now ‘off the crutches’ and has been working towards recovery with regular physiotherapy and hydrotherapy.
Now preparing to embark on a national tour, Paul said he was now ‘fighting fit and ready’.
The singer married Lorna in October 2023, six years after the death of his late wife Stacey Smith after a two-year battle with brain cancer.
They had three children, daughters Levi and Layla, 38 and 30, and son Grady, 29.
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