At Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, Savani was told he needed immediate surgery.<\/p>\n
A corneal transplant led to improvements, but he was still left partially sighted and resigned his NHS job on medical grounds.<\/p>\n
“It was like everything I’ve worked for had been taken away from me.<\/p>\n
“During that time I’ve also lost my father, who’s the head of the family \u2013 I couldn’t work out how to fill that role.<\/p>\n
“I went down a dark spiral and started cutting myself away from family, friends. My mental health suffered.”<\/p>\n
After going through a breakdown in his marriage, Savani spent nearly two months in a secure mental health unit near Northampton.<\/p>\n
“When I came out, I’d lost everything \u2013 the divorce, my home, my career, my savings.<\/p>\n
“I had no choice but to go into government housing. The apartment was literally concrete floors and I had just enough money to get a sofa bed,” he recalls.<\/p>\n
Wondering how to rebuild his life, an anonymous gift from a Good Samaritan dramatically changed his sense of purpose.<\/p>\n
“I got a message from London School of Barbering saying I had enrolled on a course.<\/p>\n
“I rang up and said ‘I think you’ve sent this to the wrong person’ and that I didn’t have a hundred pounds to my name, let alone four grand for a course.<\/p>\n
“But they said ‘No, Mr. Savani, this has been paid for you, your trains have been paid for as well’.”<\/p>\n
His initial reaction was, “I’m a corporate, I’m not going back to cutting hair,” but he decided to go to London and find out who had made the donation.<\/p>\n
It had come via a finance company and Savani has never worked out who the mystery donor was.<\/p>\n
“It’s got to be someone from my past, because they knew I cut hair and not a lot of people knew that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, Savani was told he needed immediate surgery. A corneal transplant led to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":799036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-799035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/799036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}