The Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne, has opened up about his recent Parkinson’s disease diagnosis, and his fear of catching coronavirus
The stalwart rocker recently sat down with GQ for a lengthy profile that saw him delve into his ongoing health battles. Revealing that his emphysema diagnosis puts him in the high-risk coronavirus category.
“I’ve got emphysema, so if I get this virus, I’m fucked,” he mused.
When asked about how his health is faring at the moment, Ozzy added: “The surgery I had knocked the crap out of me. But I broke my neck in a quad bike accident [in 2003] and when that healed it squeezed my spinal column, so I was getting all kinds of weird things happening to me.
“I’d be on stage and I’d suddenly get a sharp shock down one side of my body. Then one night 18 months ago I went to the bathroom in the dark and just hit the ground. I said [to my wife], ‘Sharon, I’m on the floor,’ and she said, ‘Well, get up then!’ But I couldn’t. Once you’re 70, the floodgates open and everything goes downhill. Mind you, I’ve got away with it for a long time.”
The rocker has been doing his best to stay inside and out of harms way, to avoid catching the virus.
“If I go out, I wear a mask, but I don’t like wearing a mask, so I don’t go out much,” he revealed. “The producer on my album [Andrew Watt] got the virus. I’d phone him up every day and he said he couldn’t sleep, because as soon as he went to sleep, he’d stop breathing.
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“He’s not the same person now… It’s like anyone who’s had a near-death experience: he’s become a bit careful with life. But my two granddaughters caught it and you wouldn’t think they had anything wrong with them. It just bounced off them.”
Ozzy Osbourne has previously stated that despite his various maladies, he’s not willing to experiment with a coronavirus vaccine.
“I’m trying to recover so I can get… The only good thing about this pandemic, I couldn’t work anyway because of my injuries. I’m hoping that I’ll be booking 2022, I think,” he previously told Apple Music Hits.
“To be honest with you, I don’t think it’s gonna get ship shape until the end of next year. I think this winter is gonna be fucking bad, because you’re gonna have the flu. People are, ‘I’m not taking the flu shot.’ You know what?
“You can give me anything, but I’m not gonna be number one on that fucking new vaccine. I don’t know want to be the first one to wake up with a set of fucking antlers in the morning.”
Our Ozzy has had a rough trot with his health over these past few years. In 2018, Osbourne was forced to cancel shows after he contracted what turned out to be a potentially-deadly staph infection. Sadly, the bad news kept on coming, with the rocker contracting the flu, and then pneumonia, and eventually being forced to not only cancel his Australian appearances, but also the entirety of his 2019 tour following a fall.
