Graham Norton thinks getting stabbed "changed [his] life for the better".
Graham Norton got stabbed in 1989
The 'Wheel of Fortune' host lost "half [his] blood" in the attack during his drama school days and while he was afraid for his life following the "trauma", it helped put other things in perspective and he stopped getting worried about trivial things because just being alive was enough.
Asked the worst moment of his life, he told the Daily Telegraph newspaper: "Getting stabbed in 1989. I lost half my blood. The bad moment I remember – because when it’s happening, is all just trauma – but then the morning after, I was in the hospital ward and I remember a nurse came up to me and said, ‘do you want us to contact anyone? Do you want us to contact your parents?’
"And in my head, I was thinking, ‘well, I don’t want to worry my parents but equally, if I’m going to die, they’d probably like to come and say goodbye to me, because they’d be annoyed if I didn’t tell them.’
"So, I said to the nurse, am I going to die? And she went, ‘Eerrrrm…’ and I was like, ‘don’t pause. This is not the place to pause. This is quite serious.’ So that was bad.
"But the positive of it was I was probably in my mid to late 20s; I was going into a third year at drama school, and it just put everything into perspective.
"They were doing the castings for the third-year shows; there were a lot of people crying and running into toilets and slamming doors. And I was just sitting there going, ‘I’m alive. I’m good. I’m golden.’
"So, in a way, it kind of changed my life for the better."
The 60-year-old talk show host also told of another medical incident - and admitted he ended up having his appendix removed to save face after lying about being ill to get out of school.
He said: "I pretended to be sick and my mother knew I was lying so she frog-marched me down to the doctor. She’d done this with my sister. And the doctor had gone, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that girl,’ and so my sister was in even more trouble. So now it was my turn to be humiliated by the doctor.
"I got to the doctor, and he was examining me and I was saying I’ve got a pain in my tummy. And I’m going, ‘Oow, oow oow.’ And then I get sent out of the room and he’s talking to my mother and I’m sitting in the waiting room thinking, ‘Oh, here it goes, I’m in such trouble,’ and they call me back in and he says, ‘you’ve got appendicitis and we’re going to take your appendix out.’
"And in that moment, you’ve got to decide, do I fess up and have two adults very annoyed with me. Or do I have a general anaesthetic and have an operation? So, I went with the operation.
"I was very young, but yes, I went ahead with it. But that moment in the doctor’s office wasn’t great."
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