Former England captain and 2003 World Cup winner Lewis Moody has been diagnosed with motor neurone disease.The 47-year-old former Leicester Tigers and Bath forward said the diagnosis has come as a “huge shock to me and my family”.
00:00So, recently, as close as I suppose two weeks ago, I was diagnosed with motor neurones disease and I think it's safe to say it came as a fairly sizeable shock to all of us, but I think over the last couple of months, in particularly the last couple of weeks, we've had this sort of lingering in the back of our minds.
00:29And this sort of news, until we're actually told on the day, in the appointment, I don't think it really sunk in, but in myself, I feel absolutely fine, you know, you're given this piece of information, you're given this diagnosis of MND or ALS, and it's a huge piece of information to absorb and deal with, and we're rightly quite emotional about it.
00:52But it's so strange, because I feel like nothing's wrong, you know, I don't feel ill, I don't feel unwell, and a couple of months ago, I noticed that I was getting shoulder weakness, and went and saw our physio, and nothing really changed over the course of sort of six to eight weeks.
01:06At which point, he referred me to a brilliant shoulder specialist in Bath called Guy Evans, and so I had an MRI, neck scan, all that type of stuff, and very quickly when the scans came back, it became clear that it wasn't anything to do with the neck.
01:23Despite all the years of sort of throwing myself into contact on the rugby pitch, and he then sent me straight to the neurologist, and off the back of the MRI, he actually had a phone call with me.
01:36Just me, just me and Guy, where I sensed he was preparing me for the worst, which was fairly difficult.
01:43It's never me that I feel sad for, it's the sort of sadness around having to tell my mum, you know, as an only child, and the implications that has for her, having to tell the boys, I mean, you know, two brilliant boys, and that was pretty heartbreaking, wasn't it?
02:03But yeah, we knew, I really hated sort of harbouring secrets from them anyway, in the first place, and we felt like we knew where it was going from the conversation I had with Guy initially, and I didn't like the boys not knowing that we were having a tough time, because they'd want to support us, so as soon as we could, we wanted to tell them, and yeah, I mean, how do you share a piece of information?
02:33Like that, Dylan knew what it was, at least, you know, for Ethan, he didn't know what it was, so he actually didn't really understand what I was telling him, and then we had the question, so what does that mean?
02:42We sat on the couch, in tears, you know, Ethan and Dylan both wrapped up in, you know, in each other, and the dog then jumped over, started licking the tears off our faces, which was rather sweet, but there's no, honestly, I don't even, I can't really explain it,
03:00because it was, without a shadow of a doubt, the horriblest, hardest thing I've ever had to do, but I'm really grateful we did it, I'm glad we did it at the time.
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