Jamie Foxx details the April 2023 medical emergency that nearly killed him in his new comedy special now streaming on Netflix.
Foxx, 56, confirmed he suffered a “brain bleed that led to a stroke” during the special “Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was…”
The Oscar winner was in Atlanta filming his upcoming Netflix movie, “Back in Action,” when he got a headache.
“On April 11, I had a really bad headache and I asked my son for an aspirin. I quickly realized that when you’re in a medical emergency, your kids don’t know what the hell to do.” “, Foxx said. “Before I could get the aspirin [snaps his fingers] I went out. I don’t remember 20 days.”
Friends initially took Foxx to a local doctor, who injected him with cortisone and sent him home, but sister Deidra Dixon “knew something was wrong.”
“What the hell?” Foxx said of the doctor’s initial treatment. “I don’t know if you can do Yelps for doctors, but that’s half a star.”
Foxx said Dixon drove him all over the city until she found Piedmont Hospital, “just 400 yards from where he filmed the comedy special.”
“You all saved my life, just 400 yards from here, in Piedmont Hospital. They pieced me back together,” he said. “She knew nothing about Piedmont Hospital, but she had a hunch that there were some angels [were] in there.”
At the hospital, a doctor told Dixon that Foxx was suffering from a brain hemorrhage that had led to a stroke and that he could die without emergency surgery.
“If I don’t get into his head right now, we’re going to lose him,” Foxx said the doctor told his sister, who was “kneeling outside the operating room and praying the whole time.” .”
Foxx described that feeling, saying his life didn’t flash before his eyes, but he did see “the tunnel.”
“Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes,” Foxx said. It’s strangely peaceful.” “I see the tunnel. I don’t see the light. However, I’m in that tunnel. It’s very hot in that tunnel. Damn, am I in the wrong place in this hell**** ** ? Because I looked at the end of the tunnel, and I thought I saw the devil, ‘Come on.'”
After the surgery, the doctor told Dixon that the surgeons “couldn’t find where it was coming from, but he was having a stroke.” The doctor said Foxx “can make a full recovery, but this will be the worst year of his life.”
Foxx said he woke up after the ordeal and realized he was in a wheelchair and unable to walk.
“Twenty days I don’t remember, but on May 4 I woke up [snaps fingers]and when I woke up I found myself sitting in a wheelchair. I couldn’t get around in a wheelchair and I thought, ‘Why am I in a wheelchair?’ I just got out of s***.”
When his friend told him he was having a stroke, he warned Foxx not to try to get up from his wheelchair because he couldn’t walk. Foxx said he initially believed it was all “a terrible joke”.
“Stop this damn joke,” he remembered saying and shed tears. “Jamie Foxx did not have a stroke.”
After the ordeal, Foxx entered a rehab facility to regain his motor skills after his stroke. He kept this information a secret for over a year, sharing only that he was having a medical emergency and “had been missing for 20 days.”
In December 2023, he appeared in public for the first time since his stroke to accept the Pioneer Award at the Critics’ Choice Festival of Motion Picture and Television: Celebrating the Achievements of Black, Latinx, and AAPI. He walked across the stage before giving an emotional speech.
“I couldn’t have done it six months ago, I literally couldn’t have walked to it [the stage]. And I’m not a clone, I’m not a clone,” he joked, referring to his movie “They Cloned Tyrone.”
“I cherish every moment of the present,” he said.
— With TMX reporting
Tags Jamie Foxx, Netflix