US pop star Madonna has celebrated how “life is beautiful” on her Instagram account after she reflected on her “near-death experience” last year after being put into an induced coma.
The 65-year-old was rushed to hospital last year after being found unresponsive as the result of what was determined to be a serious bacterial infection.
She was taken to the ICU and had to be intubated and later revealed that she was put into a medically induced coma as she battled for her life after going into lung and kidney failure.
Her time in intensive care led to her rescheduling the North American leg of her Celebration Tour, which later kicked off in October at The O2 in London before moving to the US, Canada and Mexico.
Now, one year on from her health scare, she celebrated how far she had come with her recovery by posting a selection of photos celebrating the American holiday of July 4 – American Independence Day.
The caption read: “Happy 4th of July! A year ago today, I had just come home from the hospital after surviving a life-threatening illness, I could barely stand in my backyard holding one sparkler.
“I made a miraculous recovery and had an amazing year. Thank you God. Life is beautiful!”
Once the Material Girl kicked off her tour, she paid tribute to her doctor, David Agus, and credited him for saving her life after she was hospitalised, before telling the story of her ordeal.
Addressing her loyal fans, she explained: “[In] Summer I had a surprise. It’s called… um… a near-death experience. Yes, and I’m not kidding. It was pretty scary.
“Obviously, I didn’t know for four days, because I was in an induced coma. But when I woke up, the first word I said was ‘No.’ Anyway, that’s what my assistant tells me.
Madonna shared her diagnosis with her fans
“And I’m pretty sure that God was saying to me, ‘Do you wanna come with us? You wanna come with me? You wanna go this way?’ And I said, ‘No. No’.”
Madonna noted that Agus had to “put up with so many entertaining phone calls from me” after she fell ill and couldn’t walk from her bed to the toilet without being in pain and having no energy.
She asked when she was going to “feel myself again” and when she could go on tour, leaving her doctor to simply reply: “Go outside in the sun”.
“‘Have you seen my skin?’ His response, ‘Go outside in the sun. You need Vitamin D so your kidneys will keep working.’ I couldn’t put those two together. And I hate the sun, but I did it anyways, and it was so hard for me to walk from my house to the backyard and sit in the sun.”
Madonna celebrated her recovery
The Vogue singer admitted she knew it sounded insane to many people but that was the only way she could describe how difficult it was for her to get up and do a simple task.
“It was a strange thing to finally not feel like I was in control. And that was my lesson to let go.”
She went on to talk about having to postpone her concert for three months and jokingly referred to her manager as a greedy b*****d for asking when she would be back on tour just hours after being taken out of the coma.
“They have a new plot to almost kill me again. When he said, ‘Well, when do you think you wanna go back on tour?’.
“I took the oxygen out of my nose, I looked at him, and I said, ‘In two f***ing months!’ … I swear to God, I just said it. And sometimes you just gotta say shit, put that out in the universe, and it happens. Are you with me, Los Angeles?” she signed off, according to Deadline.