Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh revealed that he nearly died following a battle with coronavirus back in June.
In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, the 70-year-old musician detailed that he spent 18 days at L.A.’s Cedar-Sinai hospital battling the virus.
Mothersbaugh detailed that he believes he contracted the virus in late May whilst working in the vicinity of strangers at his music production company, Mutato.
Initially he dismissed the early symptoms as fatigue, until his fever hit 103ºF. “A nurse came over the next morning and said, ‘You should be in ICU,’” Mothersbaugh remembered. “I said, ‘That’s ridiculous.’ She replied that she’d been a nurse for three decades: ‘You need an ambulance right now.’”
Anita Greenspan, Mothersbaugh’s wife, revealed that the nurse saved his life. After he was admitted to Cedar-Sinai, the musician relied on a ventilator to breathe. Whilst on the ventilator, the musician experienced hallucinations. “There’s a bookstore I love where I get stationery supplies, and in my mind I had been there,” he said. “I was convinced for about two weeks that I had been hit by a brick by somebody in Little Tokyo.”
He continued, “I felt blood from being hit. I was handcuffed to a parking deck downtown. I had this whole elaborate story of how these kids sold me to an ambulance company that then got some sort of payment for delivering Covid patients to their ICUs. I totally believed it.”
In addition to the hallucinations, Mothersbaugh revealed that he wrote a whole new Devo album and live show whilst hooked up to a ventilator. Explaining that he and the rest of the band performed the new material on the streets of LA using augmented reality.
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“We were standing on top of these projections, which were growing somehow,” the Devo rocker explained.
Mothersbaugh revealed that his experience with coronavirus made him lose touch with reality, and encouraged those who may have loved ones in an ICU battling with the virus to keep in touch.
“If you have anyone that you know who’s in ICU with COVID, contact them and keep them in touch with the outside world,” he shared, “because it’s easy to lose track of where you are and why you are. I had no idea I was on a ventilator for 10 days. Time meant nothing.”
It’s been almost two months since Mothersbaugh was discharged. Though he’s made a remarkable recovery, the musician has revealed that he’s experienced physical after-effects. In the interview, the musician held out his slightly-tremoring left hand, revealing he was experiencing “a little thing with my nerves.”
“Before COVID, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m starting to feel about 50 now, and I’m 70.’ When I was in the hospital, I was feeling like I was about 90. And now I’m back to 70, and I’m trying to get back to 50. That’s my goal,” he revealed.
Check out ‘Whip It’ by Devo:
