Sophia Michaels
Skateboarder and TV star Bam Margera said he was “basically pronounced dead” after suffering multiple seizures while sick with Covid-19 last month during an interview with fellow Jackass star Steve-O.
Margera appeared on Steve-O’s Wild Ride podcast yesterday, Jan. 5, where he immediately divulged the details behind his latest health scare (which was reported on at the time). “We have a lot to talk about because I basically was pronounced dead on Elvis’ birthday, Dec. 8,” Margera said, adding he didn’t even know he had “gnarly Covid” and that his body was shutting down at the time.
“I went into four seizures, each one lasting 10 to 20 minutes,” Margera explained. “And on the fourth one, I bit my tongue so hard it was nearly fallen off. It got so swollen and puffy it wouldn’t fit in my mouth, and I was drinking the infected blood, which gave me pneumonia as well.”
A fifth seizure occurred while Margera’s shaman, Navid, was taking him to the hospital. When he arrived, he could barely breathe and was put on a ventilator.
“So, I woke up five days later thinking I was there for a couple hours,” Margera said. “They’re like, ‘Dude, you’ve been here for nearly a week! We tried to take the tube out, and you weren’t breathing on your own.’”
Margera spent eight days in the hospital, though the harrowing ordeal clearly did not dent his sense of humor: “When they took that tube out, I felt like I sucked on Darth Vader’s dick,” he happily quipped. “I had to sip on tea and fucking lozenges all the live long day.”
Still, Margera’s health scare came at the tail end of a tumultuous year that first found him celebrating one year of substance abuse treatment but later saw him in and out of various rehab facilities. In the summer of 2021, Margera was dismissed from the set of Jackass Forever after failing a drug test, though in a lawsuit, he claimed he only tested positive for Adderall, which he had a prescription for (the lawsuit was ultimately settled).
