THE FIGHT OF MY LIFE

In this extract from his new memoir, former Bok coach Rassie Erasmus opens up about how he battled a potentially deadly disease that left him bloated and battling to breathe

'IT WAS at the rugby championship in New Zealand in 2018 that I started getting a dry cough and shivers, as if I had a bad cold. I felt feverish and had a tingling feeling on my skin like gooseflesh.

I wasn’t worried, though, because it didn’t last long. The team doctor, Dr Konrad Von Hagen, took my temperature, which was around 38 degrees. I don’t like to moan about illness, but I told him I felt I had something in my throat that was causing me to cough. He wasn’t sure what it was and put me on a course of antibiotics.

The sensation would come and go. I treated it by having a bath, and my wife gave me injections of Voltaren. It was never so bad that I felt I couldn’t get up in the morning.

I came home from the rugby championship feeling no better and then one day we trained at Belhar Rugby Club in the rain. When I got home I was feeling very cold, so I had a hot bath to warm up. But when I got out of the bath I was shivering badly.

I climbed into bed, under warm blankets but after 10 minutes, I was sweating and had to get up. I still had the dry cough and the sensation of having swallowed something that wouldn’t go down. Apart from Doc Von Hagen checking on me, I didn’t go and see my family doctor or a specialist. It didn’t seem that big a deal.

We went on the end-of-year tour in November and still I had the symptoms, not every day, but I kept getting the shivers. I didn’t really feel ill, just pap [lacking energy]. I put it all down to stress of the job as Springbok head coach.

Normally I could train full-on with the players and do the drills with them. Sometimes, if they were short of numbers, I would pack down in the scrum or stick my head in a maul. But now I started to struggle to keep up.