OZZY OSBOURNE GIVES A HEALTH UPDATE AND JOKES THAT HIS NEXT ALBUM WILL BE CALLED “RECUPERATION”

Kory Grow of Rolling Stone has written a feature article about Ozzy Osbourne. Highlights from story appear below.

When Ozzy Osbourne took a fall in January, he thought he broke his neck. “I came down really, really hard,” he tells Rolling Stone from his Los Angeles home. “I went slam — on my face.” He had gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and tripped in the dark. His wife, Sharon, took him to the hospital, where he’d spend the next two months recovering from neck surgery…

…starting last October, “everything I touch has turned to s–t,” as he put it in a statement to the press. He got surgery on his right hand after contracting a potentially deadly staph infection, forcing him to postpone several gigs. He contracted the flu, which turned into pneumonia and put him in the ICU, leading to more postponements. And then he had his fall, dislodging some of the metal rods doctors had put in his body after his near-fatal 2003 quad-bike accident. The surgery made him reschedule all of his 2019 dates for next year and he’s been recovering slowly ever since.

“For the first, say, four months, I was absolutely in agony,” he says. “I was in agony beyond anything I ever experienced before in my life. It was awful. I’m taking physical and occupational therapy classes, but the progress is very slow. They say it’s going to take at least a year. I’m hoping that I’ll be OK and ready to go by January [when his No More Tours 2 tour is set to resume]. I’m really keeping my fingers crossed…”

…“When they do surgery on your neck, they cut through all the nerves, and it f–ked everything up,” he says. “So I’m wobbling all over the place. And since they cut through the nerves, my right arm feels permanently cold.” He likens the sensation to when he would play in the snow as a kid and then warm his hands up too fast: “You’d get a warm feeling in your hands. I wake up with it, and I go to bed with it.” The doctors gave him medicine for nerve pain, which blew his mind. “I’d never heard of anyone needing nerve-pain medication,” he says…

…To make matters worse, he’s developed blood clots in his legs — “I don’t know where they came from,” he says — and he’s on blood thinners. “The nurse told me, I have to be careful if I bang myself, because there’s a blood clot and all that s–t,” he says. “It’s scary stuff … From 40 [years old] to 70 was OK and suddenly you get to 70 and everything caved in on me…”

…He’s recorded about nine song ideas – he jokes that his new album will be called Recuperation…

…All he can do now is be optimistic about his continued recovery so he can make his first gig next year….”We’re just keeping our fingers crossed.” He pauses and a metaphor comes to him. “It’s like making a sculpture,” he says. “You chip away at it and it turns into this thing. You have to resculpture your life again.”

Read more at Rolling Stone.