England rugby star Rosie Galligan on battling back against meningitis

The second cap tasted even sweeter than the first. There were more nerves, more tears and, as Rosie Galligan will confess, more of an appreciation for life.

When Galligan made her England debut in 2019, nobody could have predicted what would happen next. Life threw a ghastly curve ball, dealing her a career-threatening injury and a life-threatening illness.

She waited 1,149 days for her second cap, which came against Scotland last week, and today she will win her third in Italy.

'It was more than three years between my England caps,' says the lock, who will start in Parma this afternoon. 'My first cap was in February 2019 and I contracted meningitis that September. It was the second game of the season and I sent a text to my coach on the Friday night saying I really didn't feel well.

'I took myself to bed and my legs went really heavy. I was living at the family house of Zoe Harrison [the England No 10] and I didn't want to wake them up, so I called my dad, who drove an hour and 20 minutes to pick me up.

'The next morning my mum noticed a rash on my leg and I literally couldn't walk. It was the worst pain I'd ever been in in my life. Mum called an ambulance and they blue-lighted me into hospital straight away. I was in there for 10 days. For the first six or seven days I couldn't walk. My legs felt like they were going to fall off. They said that if I'd come in a day later I probably would have been amputated from the waist down.

'Some days I think about everything that happened and think, 'Oh my God I could have died'. I might not be sitting here right now. It could have been completely different. I'm so lucky. It was eye opening. It made me realise that there's so much more to life. It made me realise that you can't