TV and radio star Craig Charles was rushed to hospital after he fell ill while hosting a BBC music show. The 58-year-old was presenting his regular afternoon slot on 6 Music when he felt a worrying tingling in his fingers and a pain in the right side of his shoulder.
Red Dwarf star Charles managed to get through the show before his wife picked him up and insisted he visit a hospital, Liverpool Echo reports. As he returned to the show on Friday afternoon, March 24, he explained to listeners what had happened.
He said: "My hands couldn't grip the pen and my fingers were tingling. I had a pain in the right side of me shoulder going up my neck and into the back of my head.
"The producer asked: 'Are you okay?' I said, 'Not really, but we'll get through the show."
Liverpool-born Craig said his colleagues urged him to go to hospital, but he soldiered on until his wife Jackie picked him up from work later and insisted they go straight to A&E. He was given an ECG test straight away to rule out any heart problems and then spent 24 hours in hospital undergoing various scans and tests.
Craig added: "They gave me an instant ECG to make sure that my heart was fine and all that." They then spent five hours in the waiting room.
He said: "This is no disrespect or no criticism of Wythenshawe Hospital, they were brilliant, they were professional, they were caring, they were dedicated. It's just they're understaffed and they're overworked so they called me in at sort of quarter to ten at night and said you'll have to have a CT scan."
Craig said the CT scan came back all clear with "nothing wrong with the brain and the blood flows going quite nicely from my neck up into my head so I'm fine". But then he was asked to stay for an MRI scan so he had to stay in overnight, but the hospital had no spare beds.
He added: "So we spent the night in the A&E in the triage department, me and Jackie on this little single hospital trolley got about an hour's kip until some guy came in screaming because he'd dislocated his shoulder.
Craig explained the doctors still don't know what's wrong with him but reassured listeners he's "not dying yet".
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