Eric Church reveals in his sit-down with Rolling Stone that he had a terrifying health scare in June 2017 that required emergency surgery for a blood clot to save his life, ‘I was going to die’.
As his arena tour was winding down last year, Church noticed that his hands were tingling a lot but didn’t really worry to much. He just associated it with nerves and didn’t think it was anything. But then in June, when he was back home in North Carolina he noticed something strange while watching the College World Series and texting about golf, his left hand was not responding like it should. He looked at his arm, “it appeared a little swollen”. He headed for the bathroom, when he took his shirt off his arm was noticeably red and enlarged.
Eric Church performs at the Canadian Tire Centre in Ottawa photo Dale Sinclair
Church had heard about people suffering thrombosis on airplanes, so he Googled the term. “ I had five out of five symptoms,” he says. With his wife Katherine in Nashville, he did what any man would do: drove himself to the hospital. The doctors told him he needed an ultrasound that they could not perform, So Church had them wrap up the IV in his arm, put his jacket back on and drove himself to another hospital 25 minutes away.
By this time it was 5am and he started thinking about the worst. “I was thinking about my family and kids, and how I wanted to make it back home. But I was also thinking about the tour, and what we went through. I looked back and I honestly felt pretty satisfied that I couldn’t have given another thing.”
Diagnosed with a blood clot in his chest. He needed surgery immediately. Church asked, “Can it kill me?” When the doctors responded “Today” he realized the seriousness of his condition and said, ‘I need to make a phone call.’
“To them, I was going to die,” he reflects. Rushed by ambulance he arrives at Duke University Hospital where he ended up undergoing surgery for a birth defect called thoracic outlet syndrome, in which the top rib is too close to the collarbone. “It’s called thoracic outlet syndrome,” he says. “There’s a major vein that runs through there, and when I would raise my arm, it would pinch it and damage the vein. The clot was where it tried to heal. But it kept backing up, backing up. And like any clot, when you get enough pressure, it’s gonna blow.”
Doctors told Church he was very lucky. Normally, if you’re athletic, you’ll start having issues in your 20’s. But with people his age they don’t usually find out until it’s too late. “They just fall over in the shower.”
After three days of recovery, Church underwent another surgery to have his top rib removed, and spent the rest of the summer doing physical therapy and rehab. By September, he was back out on tour. He hasn’t said anything publicly about what happened until now, but says he has suffered no long-term nerve damage; he can still play guitar, and in fact, “I play golf better than ever.”
