Sonny Bill Williams has undergone potentially life-saving open-heart surgery.
The cross-code former rugby and rugby league champion has detailed his brush with death in extraordinary detail in a lengthy YouTube video after discovering he had a congenital heart defect during a routine checkup.
Williams was recovering from neck surgery only months ago when a checkup uncovered the problem, which he has carried since birth without knowing.
Know the news with the 7NEWS app: Download today
The condition affects about two per cent of the population, but only presents symptoms in around two per cent of those who carry it.
A devout Muslim man, the footballer-turned-boxer thanked Allah repeatedly after coming out of surgery earlier this month.
“It was a success,” he said in a video recorded immediately after the procedure.
“I think my mission now is to bring awareness to this because they’re saying that there’s a lot of people that have this and they just don’t know.
“Allah is changing me, he’s changed my life forever in such a good way, and I wouldn’t change it. I’d do it again.”
Williams underwent his surgery at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital where he was operated on by Dr Michael O’Keefe, who performed a Ross procedure.
A Ross procedure is an open-heart surgery used to replace a diseased aortic valve with the patient’s own healthy pulmonary value.
“It’s one of the only operations in cardiac surgery we do that puts you back on a normal life expectancy curve, which is just wild,” O’Keefe said.
“As opposed to doing a mechanical value or a tissue value where, regrettably, the life expectancy drops due to the complications of the devices.
“We replaced your pulmonary value with a human-donated pulmonary value, which is always a problem due to supply and demand. It’s basically a donated human organ.
“The pulmonary value doesn’t have viable cells in it, so there’s no rejection or anything like that, but it does cause a bit of an inflammatory response and that’s why you’re feeling like you’ve been whacked by a truck.”
Asked by Williams if the condition would have affected his decorated sporting career, O’Keefe said: “Definitely.
“The fact that you did so well and at such a high level, just goes to show you how fit you must have been to be able to compensate for it.
“You’ve been playing with a handicap, which you hadn’t realised for a long time.”
Williams said he only realises now how much it affected him during his NRL and rugby days.
“Upon reflecting, I feel like towards my late 20s, I definitely felt like I couldn’t get as fit as I used to,” he said.
“Understanding that I had this throughout my career, I’m so grateful … that I found it the way I found it.
“The doctors both said, ‘This is a miracle that you found it because this is a case of a perfectly fit-looking person dropping dead’, because my heart was 7.5cm — it was about to pop, as the doctor said.
“And now I’ve got a better heart than when I walked in here because it’s more efficient now.”
Doctors explained to Williams that he was effectively having two open-heart surgeries in one.
The 41-year-old spent more than a week in hospital but is now recovering at home.
“After that second day, on that second night when I was by myself, that’s when I honestly felt like I didn’t know if I was going to make it,” he said.
“I was having hallucinations, I was delirious, I was cold but I was sweating, I couldn’t sleep, in pain.
“It was like five hours. I remember looking at the clock and it was midnight all the way till 5am.
“So to go from there after the second day, to seven days later being where we are now, wallah, I’m just grateful. I can’t be any more grateful.”
