Sarah Silverman ‘Lucky to Be Alive’ after ‘Freak’ Medical Scare

Sarah Silverman is “lucky to be alive” after suffering from a rare illness last week, she revealed in a social media post Wednesday.

In a Facebook post, the 45-year-old comedian wrote that she was in the intensive care unit of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles all of last week after being hospitalized with epiglottitis, a rare, life-threatening throat illness.

“I was in the ICU all of last week and I am insanely lucky to be alive,” Silverman wrote. “Don’t even know why I went to the doctor, it was just a sore throat. But I had a freak case of epiglottitis.”

Epiglottitis, according to the Mayo Clinic, occurs when the small “lid” of cartilage that covers the windpipe, called the epiglottis, swells up and prevents air from reaching the lungs.

“They couldn’t put me fully to sleep for the recovery process because my blood pressure’s too low,” Silverman explained of the ordeal. “I was drugged just enough to not feel the pain and have no idea what was happening or where I was. They had to have my hands restrained to keep me from pulling out my breathing tube. My friend Stephanie said I kept writing ‘was I in an accident?'”

“When I woke up 5 days later I didn’t remember anything,” she added. “I thanked everyone at the ICU for my life, went home, and then slowly as the opiates faded away, remembered the trauma of the surgery & spent the first two days home kind of free-falling from the meds / lack of meds and the paralyzing realization that nothing matters. Luckily that was followed by the motivating revelation that nothing matters.”

The School of Rock and Wreck-It Ralph star thanked the team of doctors who saved her life and expressed gratitude to her friends and family for ensuring she was never left alone at the hospital.

Silverman also shared a few comedic stories from her hospital stay.

“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.”

The comedian received an outpouring of support from fans on her Facebook page.

Read Silverman’s full post below.

 

Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum