Madonna 'couldn’t get out of bed' following 2023 hospitalization for sepsis
Madonna is grateful to be alive and mobile after her terrifying hospitalization in 2023.
The “Vogue” singer opened up about the experience during the “On Purpose with Jay Shetty” podcast this week, recalling how suddenly her health declined.
"I was rehearsing for my tour, and I got a bacterial infection," she said. "One minute I was alive and dancing around and the next minute I was in the ICU unit of a hospital and I woke up from being unconscious for four days."
She continued, "I got out of the hospital, they took me off the ventilator, I started to breathe on my own, and I had something, it's called sepsis, and it can kill you.”
Sepsis is "a serious condition in which the body responds improperly to an infection,” according to the Mayo Clinic.
Madonna remembered feeling severely slowed down by the infection, despite her generally high energy personality.
"I always saw myself as superwoman," she said. "So, I was like, 'Oh, I'm going to kick this. I'm going to be good. I'm getting back into rehearsals.' "
Following the infection, she said she had "no strength," "no energy," "couldn't get out of bed" and "didn't know when it was going to end."
What helped her through the hardest part was a lesson from her Kabbalah teacher.
"I used to talk to my teacher all the time and he was like, 'The sooner you accept what's happening to you and that you don't know when it's going to end, the sooner it's going to end,' " she revealed of her mindset during her recovery. "That made so much sense to me. And of course it did."
The 67-year-old admitted she worried about not bouncing back entirely, but her lesson of “radical acceptance” helped.
"But I mean, I've heard some people never recover from it completely, never have their like full of health again," she said. "So again, it's the same idea, same concept as sitting around feeling sorry for yourself, 'Oh well, woe is me or poor me.' I will not accept it. Well, then you're just going to be swimming in suffering."
