Friday 16 September 2016 09:43, UK
Mike Brown will make his first appearance since England's triumphant summer tour of Australia on Saturday after recovering from septicaemia.
Brown was hospitalised by the potentially life-threatening blood infection and was absent for the first two matches of Harlequins' Aviva Premiership campaign.
However, having spent five days under medical supervision, he has been passed fit to line up against Exeter on Saturday.
Although the cause of the infection is unknown, Brown said that that starting all three Tests in the 3-0 series victory over the Wallabies left him battered and bruised.
"I woke up one morning with a pain in my shoulder," he said. "I thought it was just a bang in training, then I started feeling quite ill and was sent for an MRI and blood tests
"I ended up in hospital for five days with septicaemia. I was cold, with shivers and bug symptoms, and my shoulder pain was getting worse and worse. My haemoglobin was down, white blood cells down, liver down.
"I had no lacerations or bites or anything. It could have been a trauma from the Australia tour, I was quite bruised.
"Coming back, you have to take it step by step and see how you react because the body systems take a bit of a hammering.
"To start with, I didn't really know what was going on. It was frustrating because I'd done four weeks of really hard training.
"My weight was still down last week, but I'm ready to go now. Playing rugby is what I'm about."
Despite having already won the series, England's tired troops somehow managed to beat Australia 44-40 in the final Test in Melbourne.
And Brown added: "I was hanging on a bit at the end but, although it had been a 13-month season, it was the best game we played there.
"To do that in the last Test when we had already wrapped up the series, when we could easily have gone 'nah, nah we've won the series, we're on holiday, shows what this group is about.
"But it's only a start with England. If you look at it, we haven't really achieved much.
"Achieving things is when you start winning multiple grand slams, beating southern hemisphere teams all the time, being number one side in the world, and winning multiple World Cups.
"It's a good start and we've got to use it as a stepping-stone. There's more pressure on us now and more teams that want to knock us down."
