Earlier this month, Brian May revealed that he had shredded his buttock muscles in a “bizarre gardening accident” that had left him in “excruciating” pain. But on Sunday he took to Instagram to explain that the situation had actually been much more serious: the 72-year-old Queen guitarist had in fact suffered a “small heart attack” that left him “very near death.”
May explained in a series of Instagram video posts that after being hospitalized and treated for his gluteus maximus injury, he was still suffering a week later, a development that baffled his doctors. “No other test were done… [I was] still in agony. I mean, real agony,” he posted. “I wanted to jump at some point. I could not believe the pain.”
May then underwent a lower-spine MRI, which revealed that he had a “quite severely” compressed sciatic nerve — which May described as “someone was putting a screwdriver in my back the whole time” and “terrible pain which actually destroys your mind.” In one caption, May theorized that a lifetime of guitar-playing had led to this condition: “Why did those discs in my spine get so squished? Well I think 50 years of running around with a guitar strap over my left shoulder holding a heavy guitar might have something to do with it!”
But May’s health issues did not end there. “In the middle of the whole saga of the whole painful backside, I had a small heart attack,” he revealed. “I say ‘small,’ you know — it’s not something that did me any harm. It was about 40 minutes of pain in the chest and tightness and that feeling in the arms and sweating.” May’s doctor then drove him to the hospital, where May received an angiogram and learned that he had three congested arteries that were “in danger of blocking the supply of blood to my heart.”
May was treated by medics as an “emergency case” and advised to have open-heart surgery, but after reviewing his treatment options, he decided to have three stents inserted instead. “It’s an incredible operation done by the right skillful person, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart,” he said. “Because I walked out with a heart that’s very strong now, so I think I’m in good shape for some time to come. … I’m incredibly grateful that I now have a life to lead again.”
May said he was surprised to find out about the blocked arteries, since he’d always considered himself to be healthy “Everyone says, ‘You’ve got great blood pressure, great heart rate.’ I keep fit on my bike, good diet, not too much fat. … I had no idea, I had great electrocardiograms and whatever. Nothing could tell me that I was about to be in real, real trouble, because I could have died from that, from the blockages that were there.” The guitarist urged everyone over the age of 60 to have an angiogram, saying, “We’ve all got to really look at ourselves as we get to the autumn years. What seems to be a healthy heart may not be.”
Showing that he hadn’t lost his sense of humor, May joked about all the buttocks-centric tabloid headlines that ran after his initial gardening-injury diagnosis, saying, “I kind of forgot that anything to do with the bum people find amusing, so I got a bit pissed off with all the ‘Brian May gets a pain in the bum’ kind of stuff.”
May expressed gratitude for the medical staff who saved him, stating: “I was actually very near death because of this, but the pain that I had was from something completely different, it’s funny how things work. I’m good, I’m here, and I’m ready to rock.”
This article was originally published on yahoo.com/entertainment.
