‘Something wasn’t right’: Rick and Tayla reveal the grim reality of his Block hospitalisation

Exclusive: Rick and Tayla have already had a bit of a rollercoaster journey on The Block, but things took a turn when he was rushed to hospital during filming. 

The 63-year-old builder was absent from Sunday night’s reveals, instead spending the night in hospital. Rick and Tayla revealed that while it initially started as nothing, it turned into a serious health issue quite quickly. 

Rick told nine.com.au that his knees aren’t great, but going up and down the stairs during Living, Dining and Alfresco Week started to take a toll. 

“I must have got a slight abrasion or something on the knee,” he explained. 

Rick admitted he doesn’t enjoy wearing knee-pads, because they annoy him, and he kept working through. 

“I ended up getting bursitis,” he explained. 

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Bursitis is when a bursa becomes inflamed, and a bursa is a fluid-filled ‘cushion’ that protects a tendon where it touches a bone, according to Health Direct.

“I could hardly walk and Tayla came up to me up and said, ‘Dad, what’s going on?’” he added.

But being stubborn, Rick brushed it off, until he started to notice that the redness was spreading up his leg quickly. 

“That's a sign of infection that's moving quite quickly,” he said.

He was trying to keep the knee issue private, but because they were mic’d up, a producer overheard him and things ramped up. 

Tayla had a different version of the story and said that her dad told her he knelt down on a nail and got a cut from it, which must have got infected. 

“I said, ‘Well, go to first aid’ and he wouldn’t go,” she recalled. 

“I spoke to production, and I said, ‘You need to go to the hospital,’ because he's only got one kidney, and he can't take Nurofen or Panadol, because of his previous cancer and someone ended up taking him to the emergency doctor.” 

When the doctor looked at Rick’s knee, he was told to go straight to the emergency department at the hospital for IV antibiotics because of how bad the infection was.

“He could have got sepsis and died!” Tayla exclaimed. 

“You lied to me, dad, well, you didn’t tell me the full story, but I knew straight away something wasn’t right.”

Production told Rick there wasn’t much point of him being there at the sharehouse while he tried to recover, so they sent him home for a few days. 

For Tayla, there was a slight silver lining to her dad being sent home – no one could stop her painting now. 

“I get to finally paint because no one else is allowed to paint, so I get to finally paint and then maybe show everybody that I can actually paint,” she said. 

“But no it was scary, absolutely scary and I’m just glad that we got to it on time before anything could get worse.” 

And as viewers – and the contestants – have come to learn, there’s always help on The Block and they didn’t leave Tayla solo to battle through the week. 

On Monday night her new teammate was revealed, former Blockhead Spence, who appeared on the show with wife Kerrie in 2018 and has recently worked for Nine and Six who run construction on the show. 

“I mean, it was so cool,” she said of being partnered with ‘uncle Spence’ as he affectionately became known. 

“He gave me some really good ideas and threw some things in there that I wouldn't have thought of, but it was beautiful working with Spence.”