Ozzy Osbourne has gone into detail about being diagnosed with a potentially deadly staph infection, which led him to postpone four shows of his US tour.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, he revealed that his right thumb had swollen to the size of a lightbulb but he didn’t stop cracking jokes, even after the thumb was ten times larger than its usual was size and he was taken to the emergency room.
“I didn’t feel sick, so I was cracking jokes,” he said. At the hospital, he’d learned he had contracted a serious staph infection – three in fact, one of which spread to his middle finger. He then detailed what the doctor did to his thumb.
“You put your thumb” – after the doctor had frozen it – “in front of your face on your right hand, they went in by the side of the nail on the left side for the flesh under the nail,” he said.
“They cut all this stuff out. Even with the numbing stuff, it was agony. It wasn’t pus, but it was the stage after pus, when it gets in the blood and goes in your body and fucking kills you. It may sound fucked up what I’m saying to you, but he was really concerned about checking my blood.”
As far as how Osbourne contracted the infection, the doctor put it down to meet-and-greets.
“The doctor said to me, ‘Can you remember talking to someone and shaking hands?’” Osbourne said.
“Well, I do that meet and greet at the gig and I must shake fucking 200 hands a day. He said, ‘That explains it.’”
When it comes to Osbourne’s recovery, the antibiotics he has been taking have apparently knocked the wind out of him, but he is getting there.
“I tried working out for two minutes and I thought I was gonna fuckin’ die, because the antibiotic knocks the wind out of your sails big-time,” he said.
“So I went, ‘You know what? I’ll let the doctor be the doctor and I’ll be the patient.’ So now compared to what I was like, I feel about 85 to 90 percent better. So I’m well on the mend.”
We wish Ozzy a speedy recovery back to 100%. He’ll be in the country early next year, headlining Download Festival in March.
