It was during last autumn’s Dunhill Links at St Andrews, golf’s annual fusion of sport and celebrity, that Michael Vaughan first sensed there was something deeply wrong. Needing to head straight to the driving range to limber up, he found that he could not even haul himself out of bed. 

This felt different to the usual morning creakiness, an occupational hazard for anyone who played 82 Test matches. On this occasion, his body would not move, with his room-mate Matt Roney, a close friend from Sheffield, required to drag him into position just so that he could put on his shoes.

Not that he knew it then, but it would be the first episode of a nine-month nightmare from which he has only just begun to emerge. While he has kept the details hidden from everybody besides his family and most trusted confidants, Vaughan has been battling a stress-induced inflammatory illness so acute that, on the first day of the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne, he was incapable of picking up a microphone. 

“I’ll be honest with you, I was never going to speak about it,” he says. “But then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, there are probably quite a few people who go through similar and stay silent’. I don’t want this to appear as if I’m after any sympathy, because I’m not. I just hope I can help one or two people.”

We meet at Suburban Green, a cafe near his Wilmslow home, where Vaughan exhibits little discomfort beyond the twinges from a weekend’s golf and a morning on the padel court. And yet given the torment of recent months, the very fact that he is out for a ­coffee at all signals progress. “There were loads of times when I wouldn’t go out, because I was embarrassed. Even climbing in and out of a car was awful. I would try to walk over the road to Starbucks, and I’d be hobbling. Somebody would ask if I was OK. ‘Fine,’ I’d reply. ‘Just a dodgy knee’.”

Except the reality was more alarming. Coupled with the immobility was a pain unlike any he had known, radiating through the joints to his neck and his right shoulder. At 49, Vaughan had gone through life mitigating most aches with ibuprofen tablets – “if in doubt, pop a pink one” was his philosophy – but this time the agony was intolerable. “If I had been 80 with this,” he says, bluntly, “I would have wanted to be shot.”

Fears of Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis

What he could not fathom was the cause, or the illness his symptoms denoted. He fell into long, fruitless consultations with “Dr Google”, imagining that he had everything from Parkinson’s disease to multiple sclerosis. “I genuinely feared the worst,” he reflects. 

Jolted into seeing a doctor, he was referred immediately to a rheumatologist, who ordered blood tests that revealed his inflammation markers to be “sky-high”. She prescribed a couple of powerful steroid injections: one in the knee, another in the backside. He headed off for a two-week family holiday in Majorca if not quite reassured, then at least partially soothed.

The reprieve would be all too fleeting. “I started to do a bit of training, but I couldn’t manage a press-up. I went to the gym, tried a bit of bike work. I started trying to lift, and I couldn’t press anything. I just had nothing.”

For somebody who prided himself, even 15 years after his Test retirement, on his fitness regime, the decline was as distressing as it was sudden. But despite extensive MRI scans, doctors could find no structural damage, approving him to fly out for his winter commentating stint in Australia with an industrial supply of steroids.

If he imagined the change of scenery would be restorative, he was mistaken. “I love to do the Coogee to Bondi walk,” he says, describing the glorious clifftop route between Sydney’s southern beaches. “It’s meant to be my release every morning. But I was absolutely exhausted. On Boxing Day, I went to cover the Test between Australia and Pakistan, and I couldn’t lift the microphone. Matthew Weiss, the man in charge at Fox Sports, said: ‘You’re going straight to hospital.’ 

“I was put on the highest level of CBD Vape, the same substance that some cancer patients use to get rid of the pain. I still couldn’t tie my shoelaces, though. I couldn’t even do up the buttons on my shirt.”

Although the staff in Fox’s wardrobe department helped, Vaughan was terrified. “Usually my Aussie mates say, ‘Aw, get on with it, mate’. But even they thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ They weren’t half as worried as I was.”