On the eve of Madonna’s highly anticipated Celebration tour, her sudden hospitalization in June due to a bacterial infection had shocked the music world.
Now recovered and on the road, the Queen of Pop is sharing more details about her health scare, such as the moments she was found unconscious, as well as being placed in a 48-hour coma.
During a performance at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn last week, Madonna thanked members of her inner circle who were present for the emergency, according to fan-recorded video. Among them was the person who had found the singer unconscious in her bathroom and rushed her to the hospital.
“There’s one very important woman who dragged me to the hospital — I don’t even remember, I passed out on my bathroom floor and woke up in the ICU,” she said before thanking Shavawn Gordon, her longtime assistant and friend who runs a fan page on Instagram.
Madonna went on to thank her Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, teacher who was with her at the hospital.
“I was in an induced coma for 48 hours,” she continued, “and the only voice I heard was his. I heard him saying, ‘Squeeze my hand,’ that’s it.”
At an earlier show in Paris, Madonna also talked about her illness. She said that her “lungs weren’t working” and required a machine to assist her breathing and that her “kidneys were failing” while she was in the intensive care unit, according to Daily Mail.
The Celebration tour, a retrospective of Madonna’s four-decade career, was originally scheduled to begin in July. While in the hospital, her longtime manager Guy Oseary said that her tour would have to be postponed, but “a full recovery is expected.”
The tour kicked off in October in London’s O2 Arena. At that performance, she told the audience that she and her doctors didn’t think she would survive the serious infection.
“I forgot five days of my life, or my death, I don’t really know where I was,” she said during the London show. “But the angels were protecting me. And my children were there. And my children always save me, every time.”
Last week, she started the U.S. leg of her tour, playing three sold-out shows at Barclay’s, including a Dec. 13 gig for which she showed up around an hour later than usual, drawing ire from the packed arena crowd.
___
© 2023 Los Angeles Times
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
