Sarah Silverman Tells Facebook Friends She Almost Died Last Week
Yesterday Sarah Silverman posted on Facebook, explaining to friends, fans and some family, that she disappeared last week. The reason she wasn’t around was because she was in the hospital and almost died.
Her story sounds like something out of an episode of one of those hospital television shows- House, or Grey’s Anatomy– you know those shows where every week it seems someone goes to see their doctor with just an every day ailment only to find out it’s much more serious, and they could die. Sarah went to the doctor with a sore throat. She posts that she doesn’t even know why she went to the doctor, it was just a sore throat. Of course, when you use your voice to earn your living, nothing is ever just a sore throat, and Sarah’s been on tour with her Sarah Silverman and Friends show.
Turns out she had a rare condition which can be fatal, involving the cartilage that protects your windpipe swelling to the point where it was cutting off her air. It’s called Epiglottitis, and required surgery and a breathing tube and days recovering in the ICU. Silverman said she had to be heavily drugged for the pain, and restrained with her hands tied down so she wouldn’t tear out the breathing tube. Five days later, she ‘woke up’ unable to remember anything that had happened, but a friend said she kept asking if she had been in an accident.
Silverman posted thanks to the doctors, nurses, technicians and orderlies who she says saved her life on Facebook, in a lengthy post that she said explains to “everyone in my life at once why I haven’t been around.”
In her post, she talks about how the incident affected her emotionally, and spiritually– the strange dichotomy between “Why me?” and the other, “Why me?”, being on and off opiates, in and out of consciousness, and both the “paralyzing realization that nothing matters” and later the “motivating realization that nothing matters.” Although the experience seems to have changed her, and the post is a serious one, Silverman can’t help being funny. She wrote:
“I couldn’t speak for a while and I don’t remember a lot of my “lucid” time, but Amy (the Zvi) told me I stopped a nurse – like it was an emergency – furiously wrote down a note and gave it to her. When she looked at it, it just said, “Do you live with your mother?” next to a drawing of a penis.”
She closed her post with another funny story. “when I first woke up and the breathing tube came out, I still couldn’t talk and they gave me a board of letters to communicate. My loved ones stood there, so curious what was going to be the first thing I had to say. They followed my finger, rapt, as I pointed from letter to letter until I finally spelled out, “Did you see ‘Hello My Name is Doris.'”
