Funny-woman Sarah Silverman on Wednesday said she is “insanely lucky to be alive” after undergoing surgery and spending a week in the intensive care unit due to a deadly disease.
The 45-year-old announced on her official Facebook account that she was admitted at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles due to what she calls “a freak case of epiglottitis.”
Epiglottitis is a swelling of the cartilage lid that covers the windpipe. The condition constitutes a medical emergency because if the swelling is bad enough, it can completely block the flow of air into lungs causing death within minutes.
Silverman thanked her doctors for saving her life after she went in for what she thought was “just a sore throat” adding that she had to have her hands restrained to keep her from pulling out her breathing tube.
Hi I’ve been away at the hospital & I wrote about it ❤️?https://t.co/zxdhuI790A
— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) July 7, 2016
“When I woke up five days later I didn’t remember anything,” she wrote. “I thanked everyone at the ICU for my life, went home, and then slowly as the opiates faded away, remembered the trauma of the surgery.”
The Jewish comedian who has recently been shadowed by deaths, including her 73-year-old mother, Beth Ann O’Hara, found herself in a thoughtful mood after her recovery.
“There’s something that happens when three people you’re so close to die within a year and then YOU almost die but don’t. (That was me. I’m the one that didn’t die.) It’s a strange dichotomy between, ‘Why me?’ and the other, ‘Why me?’” she wrote.
Silverman also expressed gratitude to her boyfriend, Michael Sheen, and friends, for sitting by her side.
