Ozzy Osbourne has posthumously shared details of his gruelling battle with Parkinson’s disease, sepsis, blood clots, emphysema and multiple bouts of pneumonia in a new memoir, Last Rites.
The Black Sabbath frontman died, aged 76, this July, shortly after playing his final concert at Villa Park in Birmingham in front of thousands of fans.
In early December last year, Osbourne said he’d planned to travel to LA to rehearse for his big send-off at Villa Park for seven months but was instead struck down by a back injury and pneumonia.
“Which is bad enough for a normal person, never mind someone with Parkinson’s,” he wrote in a Last Rites excerpt published in The Times.
“It kicked off my emphysema, causing one of my lungs to go down.”
Emphysema is a chronic lung condition that can make everyday activities such as walking, talking, and even breathing, feel like a challenge.
Osbourne said doctors refused to operate on his back for fear the operation would kill him but he sought opinions from other surgeons until he found one who would give him the procedure.
The Black Sabbath frontman underwent the operation in January, which “filled the cracks in my dodgy vertebra with this human cement stuff” to stabilise his spine. Shortly afterwards, he developed sepsis.
Sepsis is a life-threatening reaction to an infection and occurs when the body’s immune system overreacts and starts to damage the body’s own tissues and organs. “It was really touch and go,” Osbourne said.
“I mean, at my age, with Parkinson’s and blood clots and all the other shit that’s going on, I had about as much chance of surviving a major sepsis infection as I did of winning the next season of Love Island.”
Osbourne was unable to keep food down and became “weaker by the day”, with Sharon and his children emotionally preparing themselves for his imminent death.
“I was like, OK, I’ve had a good run, it’s game over now. But after two months of antibiotics – on a twice-a-day IV drip – I somehow bounced back…I celebrated by getting pneumonia again,” he said.
Rehearsals for the Villa Park concert weren’t able to begin until three weeks before the show and Osbourne was forced to perform from a huge black throne because he was too unwell to stand up and sing.
He wrote of the moment he finally took to the stage: “Suddenly I was looking out over 42,000 faces, with another 5.8 million watching online. That was when the emotion really hit me. I’d never really taken it on board that so many people liked me.”
The rocker’s official death certificate lists his cause of death as “acute myocardial infarction” – typically meaning the death of tissue resulting from a failure of blood supply to an organ – and a heart attack.
The certificate also listed coronary artery disease and Parkinson’s disease with autonomic dysfunction as “joint causes” of death.
“Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder,” Osbourne reflected in Last Rites. “Not that I’m ready to go. But I’ve had a good run. I think I made a mark on the world.”
Last Rites is published on Tuesday, 7 October.
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