Hibs midfielder Scott Allan has explained how he broke down when he told his mum that he might be forced to retire from football.
The former Celtic playmaker was diagnosed with a heart condition that might've forced him to hang up his boots and the 29-year-old has revealed just how much toll the ordeal had on his emotional state.
After spending the second-half of last season getting valuable game-time under his belt whilst on loan with Inverness Caley Thistle, Allan is now looking to reassert himself as a key player in Jack Ross's Easter Road squad.
Speaking to the British Heart Foundation as part of a series of podcasts, Allan said: “I think two to three weeks into pre-season I definitely didn’t feel myself – extreme fatigue and when I was doing certain runs in training I was getting blurred vision, feeling dizzy and faint-like symptoms.
“But I was still kind of getting through it and it wasn’t until I realised how much it was impacting on my performance on a match day – just in terms of ten minutes into the game, really short of breath – it must have been about the fifth game (against Aberdeen) that I knew something’s not right.”
Allan was diagnosed as having diabetes at the age of three, and he added: "The first thing people ask me is ‘it must be your diabetes’ because hypo (hypoglycaemia) symptoms are very similar to the ones that show with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, but I think I knew it wasn’t the same thing.
“I went to my doctor to get tested and then I played the game against Aberdeen on August 30 and I remember coming in, I was physically weak, I was really poor in terms of performance level, which I know wasn’t like me.
“It was after that I said ‘I need to get my heart tested again too’ and they arranged for me to go to the Hampden clinic. The cardiologist there wasn’t particularly happy with it, so they spoke to the Hibernian doctor and he said ‘listen, we’ll go to London for this’.
“As a football player, you just think everything will be OK. I thought I would just go down (to London), they would tick a box and I would be OK and it will just be something else.”
Allan could be involved in Hibs ' glamorous pre-season friendly against Premier League giants Arsenal later this month, before the first competitive game of the Premiership season away to Motherwell on August 1.
