The rapper Krayzie Bone is breathing a sigh of relief after a shocking near-death scare in the hospital.
The 50-year-old member of the classic hip hop group Bone Thugs-n-Harmony revealed that doctors caring for him ‘didn’t know if I was going to make it’ after he was put under for an incredible 10 days.
He previously revealed on Instagram in October that he had gone to the hospital after he began coughing up blood uncontrollably in disturbing amounts.
In an interview with Spin from this week, the rapper revealed how close he came to never leaving the hospital, although he admitted that he had no idea how close to death he came until he woke up after a week and a half and found himself surrounded by his family and bandmates.
Krayzie Bone (real name: Anthony Henderson) shared that he first realized something was wrong when he began coughing up blood.
Bone Thugs-n-Harmony rapper Krayzie Bone revealed that doctors didn’t know if he would survive after he was hospitalized and put under for 10 days after he began coughing up blood in September
‘I was up late playing Xbox one night and I coughed and something came up that didn’t feel like the usual phlegm,’ he shared. ‘When I spit it out, it was nothing but blood.’
He thought the issue was just transitory after it seemed to have cleared up by the next day, but later that day he began coughing up even more blood, and it didn’t seem to be abating this time.
After his wife saw the disturbing sight, she told him he needed to go to the hospital immediately, but his condition began rapidly deteriorating on September 25.
‘I went to the emergency room and they gave me little bags that I was coughing the blood up in,’ he recalled.
‘By the time they came to take me to a room, I had used three of those bags.’
Despite that, Krazyie Bone wasn’t ‘worried,’ but was just ‘wondering’ what was going on with his body.
It was clear from his doctors’ reactions that it was something serious, though.
‘When they came and put me in a [hospital] room, they were saying they had to put me under to see what was going on,’ he said.
After texting his Bone Thugs-n-Harmony bandmates that he wouldn’t be able to make their next gig in Las Vegas, he was put under with anesthesia.
‘After that, I woke up 10 days later,’ he revealed.
While he was under, social media was inundated with concerns for his health and even rumors of his death, but he wasn’t conscious for any of that, though he did haer of the rumors once he had woken up.
Instead of his lengthy hospital stay, he expected to wake up after just a couple hours from a ‘standard procedure where they would go in and stop the bleeding.’
He revealed that ‘An artery in my lung had ruptured and that is what was causing the bleeding.
He revealed an artery in his lung had ruptured as the result of the infectious disease mycetoma, caused by either a fungal or bacterial infection; the other three members of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony seen in November 2022
‘When I went under, they shut the hole up. But after a day, they said the bleeding wouldn’t stop,’ he explained.
After another day with no sign of the bleeding stopping, his ‘doctor started to panic.’
‘That’s when they told my wife they might want to get the family down here,’ he shared.
Krayzie Bone then had a ballon expanded inserted into his lungs and expanded, which was left in for two days.
But on the third day after the procedure, doctors confessed to his wife that they ‘didn’t know if I was going to make it out of there.’
But he made a miraculous improvement by the fourth day.
‘My wife said the doctor came into the waiting room and told her the bleeding had stopped and gave her the thumbs up,’ he said.
But after four days of nearly unstoppable bleeding, doctors determined it was necessary to keep Krayzie Bone in the hospital and sedated for several more days to allow him to recover a bit from the trauma. He spent six more days under anesthesia and intubated.
‘When I woke up, they told me everything that happened. I had no idea I’d been there for 10 days,’ he admitted.
Doctors took four days to stop the bleeding and worried he would not make it out of the hospital alive. Afterward, he was kept under for six more days to recuperate from the constant blood loss
He found himself surrounded by his wife, all of his children and his bandmates Layzie [Bone], Flesh [Bone] and Wish [Bone], all of whom had been at the hospital every day until he woke up.
‘Damn, why is everybody so uptight? What the hell is going on?’ he recalled thinking when he saw the group assembled around him.
The rapper revealed that he was kept unconscious with a combination of four drugs, including ‘fentanyl, ketamine, propofol’ and a fourth drug that he couldn’t remember, despite one of his doctors telling him that they had never had to use all four of those drugs together to keep someone under.
‘My tolerance is very high,’ he joked. ‘One doctor was like, “I’m very impressed. This is very impressive. I’ve never seen anybody like this.”‘
He admitted he had now idea ‘how serious’ his condition was’ until he woke up.
‘The doctors in the ICU, I don’t know if it’s what they see every day, but their outlook was grim,’ he recalled. ‘They were like, “He might not make it out of here. The lung function on the left side is completely dead. He will need a lung transplant.”‘
Krayzie Bone was sent to the Ronald Reagan Center to prepare for a transplant, but his primary-care doctor put a pause on that as soon as she heard.
‘She was like, “Wait, let’s slow down here. This is my patient. I just had a visit with him and he just had one of the best breathing tests. We need to slow this down. I don’t think he needs a lung transplant,”’ he recalled. ‘That’s why I was in the hospital for so long. They were doing a whole evaluation.’
Doctors determined he didn’t qualify for a transplant because a significant amount of blood was still being pumped through the damaged portion of his lung, leading them to focus on cutting out the damaged sections.
But then doctors decided that even that might be too drastic a treatment, as his condition seemed to be improving significantly.
Krayzie Bone said doctors at first wanted to do a lung transplant after he woke up, then downgraded to surgery to cut out the damage parts of his lungs, before deciding he was healthy enough to only take medicine for the condition
‘They came back again and said, “After looking at your lungs further, we feel like we shouldn’t even do that. We hear you work out four to five times a week and do shows on the weekends. That’s not the sign of a person who needs a lung transplant or for us to go in and tamper with anything. We could mess up the quality of life you have now,”‘ he recalled. ‘So they put me on this medication to prevent what happened from happening again.’
Krazyie Bone added that he would be taking the medication for the rest of his life for ‘holes’ in his lungs related to mycetoma, an infectious disease involving bacterial or fungal infections that can affect numerous organs in the body.
The infections develop slowly, sometimes over years, so many patients are in dangerous advanced states when it is discovered. It’s unclear if his mycetoma was caused by a fungus or bacteria.
The disease followed an earlier battle with sarcoidosis from 2016, though it’s unclear if the two were related or if the damage from the earlier illness left him more susceptible to the mycetoma.
Individuals who develop sarcoidosis experience the growth of inflammatory cells known as granulomas, usually in the lungs or lymph nodes, though they can appear elsewhere in the body.
The cause is still unknown, but the disease is believed to be a response to infectious substances that enter the body and spur on the formation of the granulomas, though chemicals and dust have also been implicated.
Although Krazyie Bone shared that his sarcoidosis had been ‘in remission’ for some time, the initial damage would be with him forever.
However, he had been performing and exercising regularly for years before his latest illness, so he may still be able to lead a full and active life, depending on the long-term effects of his mycetoma battle.
In addition to his mycetoma, Krayzie Bone had suffered from the immune disease sarcodiosis in 2016, which permanently damaged his lungs and may have made him more vulnerable to the later condition; Bone Thugs-n-Harmony seen in August (without Krayzie Bone)
The rapper will now be on medication for the rest of his life, but he’s doing well and is back at the gym. He said he would ‘never take life for granted’ again
Doctors warned the rapper not to travel for work for the rest of the year, but they were optimistic after he began doing physical therapy and was able to return to the gym.
He was also trying to regain his strength after losing 25 pounds during his 10-day hospital stay.
Krazyie Bone concluded the interview by saying that his near-death experience had inspired him to ‘never take life for granted.’
‘Just seeing how fast everything could change is definitely eye-opening,’ he mused. ‘I don’t take anything for granted. Cherish all the loved ones you have.’
