Jared Payne Describes His Horrible Kidney Injury And It’s Not For The Faint Of Heart

This sounds painful.

Ireland and Ulster star Jared Payne suffered a devastating kidney injury back in November against Australia that ruled him out for several months.

Payne suffered the injury after a hard collision with Wallaby centre Reece Hodge in the first-half and astonishingly played on until half-time.

It was during the team talk led by captain Rory Best however, that Payne discovered their was something seriously wrong. Speaking to Ruaidhri O’Connor in The Irish Independent, the Ulsterman describes the series of events.

“I just passed the ball and their No 12 half-checked me and play carried on,” Payne recalls.

“After I’d cooled down a bit, I was thinking ‘Jeez, he’s a solid fella, he got me half-decent there.’

“I carried on until half-time and the coaches finished speaking, Besty was about to get us in and I just said ‘sorry, I’ve got to take a pee here’. I was beside Faz (Andy Farrell) in the toilets and realised I was p**sing blood basically, a big sort of clot came out.

“He laughed at me and said: ‘you better get that checked out’.

“The doc had a look at it, he found a clot in the toilet… I tried to say it was beetroot juice, you p*** a bit red after that, but they wouldn’t let me back on.

“Then I was told I was going to be in hospital, to just go and get a scan and be back by the end of the game; five days later I got out.”

It turns out Payne had fractured his kidney. Yep fractured.

“I was in hospital for five days, but they were just monitoring me. I had a few really good people looking after me. They’d come in each day to do a few scans and eventually reached the conclusion it was a fractured kidney.

“There was talk that they’d have to do an operation to seal off the blood vessels if it didn’t stop bleeding, but it did by itself so it was good. Since then I haven’t looked back, luckily enough.

Thankfully Payne has recovered fully since and even managed to get back into the Ireland team for their final Six Nations game, playing an important role in the win over England at his preferred position of fullback. A true warrior.