Brian May, the British guitarist of Queen, revealed Wednesday that he’d suffered a stroke that had caused him to lose control of one of his arms.
The 77-year-old musician detailed his medical emergency in a video on his website about the “health hiccup.” “The good news is that I can play guitar after the events of the last few days,” he said, wiggling the fingers on his left hand to the camera.
“I say this because it was in some doubt, because that little health hiccup that I mentioned happened about a week ago, and what they called it was a ‘minor stroke,’” May continued. “And all of a sudden out of the blue, I didn’t have any control of this arm,” he said, referring to his left arm.
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“So it’s a little scary, I have to say,” May added. He said he’d received excellent medical care at Frimley Hospital in Surrey, southeast England, after being rushed to the facility with emergency “blue lights flashing, the lot—very exciting.”
The legendary rocker explained that he hadn’t said anything publicly at the time of the incident because he really didn’t “want sympathy.”
“Please don’t do that because it’ll clutter up my inbox and I hate that,” he said.
May said that he is now OK and has been told to do “basically nothing” to recover. “I’m grounded,” he said. “I’m not allowed to go out. Well, I’m not allowed to drive, not allowed to get on a plane, not allowed to raise the heart rate too high. Not allowed to have planes flying over which will stress me—but I’m good.”
His stroke comes four years after he said he “nearly lost” his life when he suffered a heart attack. The cardiac complaint also came in the same month he was hospitalized after ripping the muscles in his buttocks “to shreds” during a spot of “overenthusiastic gardening.”
