Ozzy Osbourne says injuries he sustained in a fall at home early last year have caused more problems than Parkinson’s disease.
“If I had a choice between the Parkinson’s and the f**king neck, I’d go for the Parkinson’s,” the 71-year-old told Britain’s The Sun. “I’ve been laid up for a year now.”
Last April, Osbourne’s wife Sharon shared details of the “bad accident” in the middle of the night that dislodged “all of the metal rods and everything that were put in his body” following a quad bike accident in 2003.
The rocker said he remains on a cocktail of pain medications carefully monitored by a nurse because he is “dying for all the opiate stuff I can’t have.” (Osbourne said he has been clean and sober for seven years. “Don’t smoke tobacco, don’t drink, don’t do drugs. It’s quite boring,” he admitted. “The only other thing is masturbation.”)
Osbourne heads to Switzerland in April for up to eight weeks of treatment by medical specialists.
Earlier this week, he pulled the plug on a tour that would have brought him to Canada for shows in Montreal, Hamilton, Edmonton and Vancouver this summer. “I’ll go out there when I’m ready and I’m not ready yet,” Osbourne explained. “I just hope my fans won’t give up on me.”
The rocker told The Sun his just-released album Ordinary Man saved his life.
“Before I started work, I was just lying there thinking, ‘Poor old me’. The album got me out of bed. Some days I’d do an hour or two, other days four or five,” recalled Osbourne. “It was the best medicine I could have.”
He is also determined not to be defined by his Parkinson’s, which Osbourne said is “a milder form” than Canadian actor Michael J. Fox is living with.
“The fact is . . . what am I going to do about it? With the time I’ve got left, I don’t want to sit around being miserable,” he said. “Everybody would like to be me for a weekend. I’ve had a great life.”