This year for Brian May has been a lot like last year was for Ozzy Osbourne.

While Ozzy spent the entirety of 2019 in rehabilitation for a variety of life-altering maladies, May has a number of brushes with his mortality this year.

The Queen guitarist began the year recovering from calf surgery. By March, pandemic shutdowns had left May battling depression. Two months later, he was in the hospital after sustaining a gardening injury. Weeks later he was back in the ICU with a heart attack.

May had three stents implanted in his heart to address the blockages. Then in September, his heart medication nearly killed him when it caused what he described as a "stomach explosion" — a stomach hemorrhage.

"You have to be so careful with the medication that they give you," May told Good Morning Britain this week. "Because it's great for the stents, it's great for the heart, but it's not very good for the rest of your body, and you can really go down. It's a tightrope."

He explained that of everything he's endured, the stomach hemorrhage was the most dire.

"The was the worst point for me," he added. "But I had a bit of a bad time all-around — it sounds amusing really: a catalog of disasters."

May's longtime Queen bandmate, drummer Roger Taylor, said this summer before May's latest crisis that Queen + Adam Lambert can't blame the COVID-19 pandemic for their tour cancellations this year. Taylor said the band probably wouldn't have gotten very far due to May's health problems.

Photo: Getty Images

Kat Jackson

About Kat Jackson