In a wide-ranging interview with his former Geto Boys bandmate Willie D, legendary rapper Scarface spoke at length about his battle with COVID-19 and the drastic effects it has had on his life since his recovery.
"Hanging on that string of death makes you really appreciate life. I was inches away from death. If you let the doctors tell it, they don't know how I survived. But I do," Scarface said before showing Willie D the dialysis port doctors put in for his kidneys.
"I gotta change my entire diet, I gotta do dialysis four days a week, three hours a day. That's taking all my blood out, cleaning it and putting it back in my body. I'm glad to be alive. I fought COVID double bilateral pneumonia — both lungs — and kidney failure in my house. I went back to the hospital. I just got out of the hospital Monday [April 20]," Scarface said.
Scarface, whose real name is Brad Terrence Jordan, was honest about his struggles in the most recent Zoom interview on the Willie D Live show. He went to the hospital and tested positive for the coronavirus on March 26.
At the time, he told Willie D that he had been sick for weeks before getting tested. By the end of March, the doctor told him both of his lungs had pneumonia, and just four days later his kidneys began to fail.
Through coughs, he implored Willie D and his audience to take the virus seriously because of how dangerous his condition was getting.
Now that he is on the road to recovery, he explained everything that has happened since then. Scarface said he left the hospital after his initial diagnosis because he didn't believe doctors knew how to treat it and "would rather have died at home."
He spent three weeks struggling with COVID-19 and kidney failure at home, saying the experience was terrible and life-changing.
"That three weeks in my house was like hell. I couldn't keep food down, I couldn't get comfortable, I couldn't sleep. … I couldn't breathe. It was the worst time of my life because I couldn't do nothing. My legs were like bags of water. My kidneys failed so now I can't keep food down," he said in the interview.
The experience has prompted him to rethink how he lived his life, and he told Willie D he plans to travel more and see the world once he gets back on his feet.
Later on in the interview, Willie D asked about Georgia and other states reopening last week, which Scarface said was "stupid."
"I think that they want us as Black people to go out there and do that s**t and f**k ourselves off. Because clearly we don't know s**t about this disease. We don't know enough about it to be wanting to get back and starting life all over. But notice that the barbershops and beauty shops are opening. So we can pass that s**t out amongst ourselves and kill ourselves," Scarface said.
Willie D also asked about the recent comments from Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who said last week that "there are more important things than living," during an interview about the state's plans to reopen businesses.
"If they really wanted us to be safe, they would take more precautions than what they're doing now rather than opening this s**t back up, especially when it's still running rampant. You got 45,000 people … that have died already. That lets me know that they don't have it at bay right now, but they want to open it up. That money is not more important than our lives," he said.
"We know where they stand. Our lives don't mean s**t to them and we should take that into consideration when we make our moves. Our lives don't mean s**t to them," Scarface added.
Multiple rappers, actors and athletes have recently recovered from COVID-19, including Slim Thug, Idris Elba, Sabrina Dhowre Elba, Jason Collins and Kevin Durant.
