Brian May was 'very near death' after suffering heart attack

Queen guitarist Brian May is having a rough trot. Earlier this month, the rocker was admitted to hospital after shredding his buttock muscles during a gardening stint. The woes didn’t end there for Brian, who has now revealed details of an incident that triggered a small heart attack and the discovery of three blocked arteries that left May “very near death”.

May took to Instagram to share a seven-minute video delving into his health issues. The video, titled Sheer Heart Attack – a reference to the title of Queen’s 1974 record— saw May detail the fallout from the gardening injury, and the discovery of his heart condition.

The 72-year-old shared that the week after he was sent home following the gardening injury, he was in such agony that he “wanted to jump at some points”.

“Now a week later I’m still in agony,” he explained. “I mean real agony. I wanted to jump at some points. I could not believe the pain. And people were saying, ‘That’s not like a ripped muscle, you don’t get that amount of pain,’ so eventually I had another MRI.”

May was readmitted to the hospital for an MRI scan, which discovered a severely compressed sciatic nerve – the consequence of a 50-year stint as a guitarist.

“That’s one side of the story, and I’m a lot better now,” he continued. But the rest of the story is a little more bizarre and a bit more shocking.

“I thought I was a very healthy guy. Everyone says, ‘You’ve got a great blood pressure, you’ve got a great heart rate’. And I keep fit, I bike, good diet, not too much fat.

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“Anyway, I had – in the middle of the whole saga of the painful backside – I had a small heart attack.

“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.”

Upon realising he was having a heart attack, May called his doctor, who took him to hospital for tests that exposed his underlying heart problems. May was given the choice between open heart surgery or having heart stents fitted. He chose the latter, revealing the operation was straightforward.

May used his experience to encourage people in their “autumn years” to be wary of their health. “What seems to be a very healthy heart may not be, and I would get it checked if I were you,” he said. “I was actually very near death [but] I didn’t die. I came out and I would have been full of beans if it hadn’t been for the leg.”