Rocker Bret Michaels still has trouble moving his legs after suffering a brain hemorrhage last month — and thanks what he called his “amazing courage to want to survive” for his recovery.
In his first televised interview since being hospitalized, the 47-year-old Michaels told Oprah Winfrey that he asked God to keep him alive.
“You have to let me live through this,” Michaels said he told God from his hospital bed. “I’ve done a lot of rotten things. I’m asking for a break here.”
Emergency-room doctors found on April 21 that Michaels was bleeding at the base of the brain stem, known as a subarachnoid hemorrhage.
For Michaels’s 9-year-old daughter, Raine, the thought that her dad could die was upsetting.
“To think that my dad wouldn’t be growing up with me and my dad wouldn’t be walking me down the aisle for my wedding, it was just really heartbreaking,” she said during a taped interview on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” airing today.
Michaels — appearing via satellite from Phoenix — wiped away tears when he heard his daughter’s words.
“That’s what you think about. … It gave me this amazing courage to want to survive,” he said, according to excerpts posted on People.com.
His advice for others who suspect that something is wrong: “You need to go to the emergency room.”
Asked about the moment he felt ill, Michaels said, “It sounded like a small handgun went off in the back of my head. It felt like a pop. They call it a thunderclap. … It’s like a migraine times 10. It ran from my temple down to the back of my skull. I knew something was wrong.”
Michaels’ doctor, Joseph Zambraski, said of the 40,000 Americans a year who suffer from a subarachnoid hemorrhage, only 20 percent make a complete recovery.
Zambraski added that Michaels has not totally regained feeling in his lower extremities, but that “it’s quite a miracle that he’s done so well.”
Michaels, who also suffers from neck stiffness, said he is still in rehab and that he “gets better each day.”
Michaels, who was the frontman for Poison and starred in VH1’s dating show “Rock of Love,” also underwent an appendectomy earlier last month. He is currently starring on NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice.”
Last week, a rep said the rocker would perform at the Hard Rock Live in Biloxi, Miss., on May 28.
With AP