This past April, Ozzy Osbourne postponed all his 2019 tour dates, both in North America and Europe, as he recovers from an injury sustained while dealing with his recent bout of pneumonia. The BLACK SABBATH frontman fell at his Los Angeles home, aggravating years-old injuries from his 2003 ATV accident that required surgery.
"For the first, say, four months, I was absolutely in agony," he tells Rolling Stone in a new interview. "I was in agony beyond anything I ever experienced before in my life. It was awful. I'm taking physical and occupational therapy classes, but the progress is very slow. They say it's going to take at least a year. I'm hoping that I'll be okay and ready to go by January [when the tour resumes]. I'm really keeping my fingers crossed."
The January fall impeded the way the fluid would go down his spinal cord and resulted in him getting surgery on his spine and neck.
"When they do surgery on your neck, they cut through all the nerves, and it fucked everything up," he says. "So I'm wobbling all over the place. And since they cut through the nerves, my right arm feels permanently cold."
Regarding the time he spent in the hospital, he says: "I cannot describe to you the helpless feeling that I had. I had to use [a walker] to go for a pee. I had to have nurses, day and night. Just being in hospital is enough to drive you nuts. I thank God I didn't paralyze myself when I had that accident. I wouldn't be here now. I would have jumped off the fucking roof — or fell off the roof, whatever."
Since his latest accident, he has developed blood clots in his legs and is now on blood thinners.
"The nurse told me, I have to be careful if I bang myself, because there's a blood clot and all that shit," he says. "It's scary stuff … From 40 [years old] to 70 was okay and suddenly you get to 70 and everything caved in on me."
Despite the slow recovery, Ozzy is optimistic he can make his first gig next year. "My date is January, I hope to fucking God, 'cause I'm gonna go fucking nuts," he says. "We're just keeping our fingers crossed. It's like making a sculpture. You chip away at it and it turns into this thing. You have to resculpture your life again."
Ozzy was in a coma for eight days in December of 2003 when he accidentally crashed an ATV while riding on the grounds of his English estate. He broke his collarbone, several ribs and a neck vertebra in the incident, of which he told The Pulse Of Radio he had very little memory.
Most of the 2019 shows on Ozzy 's last full world tour have been rescheduled beginning in February 2020. Fans are being asked to hold on to their original tickets, as they will be honored for the rescheduled dates. Because some of the 2019 dates were festival appearances, not all will be rescheduled.
