Now that Ozzy Osbourne is on the mend, following the staph infection that forced him to reschedule the last few North American dates of his No More Tours 2 Tour, he’s getting back onstage earlier than expected.
After a Salt Lake City gig earlier this month, he had trouble putting on a thumb ring he regularly wears. The digit got larger overnight until it was 10 times bigger than usual. “I freaked out,” he says. He showed it to his wife and manager, Sharon, and she took him to the emergency room, where he learned he’d contracted a potentially deadly staph infection. Ozzy subsequently postponed four shows and focused on his treatment.
First, the doctors froze his thumb. Then they went in. “You put your thumb in front of your face on your right hand, they went in by the side of the nail on the left side for the flesh under the nail,” he says. “They cut all this stuff out. Even with the numbing stuff, it was agony. It wasn’t pus, but it was the stage after pus, when it gets in the blood and goes in your body and fucking kills you. It may sound fucked up what I’m saying to you, but he was really concerned about checking my blood.”
At one point, he asked how he could have gotten it. “The doctor said to me, ‘Can you remember talking to someone and shaking hands?’” Osbourne recalls. “Well, I do that meet and greet at the gig and I must shake fucking 200 hands a day. He said, ‘That explains it.’”
Feeling better after surgery. Ice cream helps pic.twitter.com/L3JWScrOI5
— Ozzy Osbourne (@OzzyOsbourne) October 7, 2018
They put him on drip and pill antibiotics, which knocked him out. “I could hardly move,” he says. “I really had no energy.” The thing that “got [him] out of the blues” was eating ice cream, he says. (He even posted a picture of him doing just that to social media while under doctors’ care.) After spending a little less than a week in the hospital, he was sent home with a special soap for his hand and was told to soak it twice a day for about 10 days. “I said to Sharon, ‘What the fuck am I gonna do for the gig?’” he recalls, before they postponed the first show. “Then the doctor said, ‘You must be fucking crazy. You get another staph infection, and you could die.’ He said, ‘One’s enough. You’ve got three individual ones.’”
After it was reported that he was postponing shows in California and Las Vegas it was just just announced that on December 31st, he’ll headline a one-off Ozzfest at the L.A. Forum and count down to the new year. Joining him will be Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Korn’s Jonathan Davis (playing a solo set) and Body Count.
“Ozzy hates the holidays,” Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy’s wife and manager, tells Rolling Stone with a laugh. “He hates Christmas and he hates New Year’s Eve. He always saying, ‘Let’s do a gig.’ And I’m always like, ‘There never is one.’ So this year, we said, ‘All right, let’s do an Ozzfest, because we never did it this year.’ Everybody used to play on New Year’s and Christmas in the Seventies and Eighties, but not anymore. So it’s the perfect time.”
With a few months to go until the Ozzfest, Osbourne plans on resting up to get back into fighting shape. He told Rolling Stone that he’s currently about “85 to 90 percent better” after undergoing surgery on his right hand, where he had contracted three potentially deadly staph infections. “They cut all this stuff out of my thumb,” he said. “Even with the numbing stuff, it was agony.” Ultimately, the whole experience made him eager to get back on the road. “It could have been a lot worse,” he said. “I could have been dead.”
Tickets for the event go on sale this Friday at 10 a.m. PT via Live Nation. In addition to the performances, the Ozzfest will also feature other “holiday festivities,” which are yet to be announced.
(Excerpt) Read More at: 1069TheArrow.com and RollingStone.com