Dr. Dre is opening up about experiencing three strokes while being hospitalized for a brain aneurysm two years ago.
“It’s just something that you can’t control that just happens, and during those two weeks I had three strokes,” Dre (real name Andre Romelle Young), 59, revealed on SiriusXM’s This Life of Mine With James Corden on Thursday, March 14.
Dre made headlines in January 2021 when he was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after suffering a brain aneurysm. At the time, a source exclusively told Us Weekly that the doctors were “extremely concerned” about him.
Dre told host James Corden that on the day he was hospitalized, he woke up with a feeling behind his right ear that developed into the “worst pain [he] ever felt.”
“I got up and I went on about my day, and I thought that I could just lay down and take a nap,” he said. “My son had a female friend that was there and was like, ‘No, we need to take you to the hospital.’ So they took me to urgent care.”
After arriving at urgent care, Dre found out his condition was “serious.”
“Next thing you know, I’m blacking out. I’m in and out of consciousness, and I ended up in the ICU,” Dre said. “I was there for two weeks. I’m hearing the doctors coming in and saying, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’”
Dre said “nobody could give [him] an answer” as to whether he could’ve prevented his health scare from happening.
“I had no idea that I had high blood pressure or anything like that because I’m on my health s–t. I’m lifting weights, I’m running, I’m doing everything that I can to keep myself healthy,” he said. “I said, ‘Would that have prevented it if I had worked out a little bit harder or ate different or something like that?’ It’s like, no, it’s hereditary. High blood pressure in Black men, that’s just what it is. They call it the silent killer. You just have no idea, so you know, you have to keep your s–t checked.”
When Corden, 45, asked how the experience has altered Dre’s life now, he admitted he’s not sure if there was a “significant change” to his day-to-day routine.
“I’m not saying, ‘OK, I’m just going to go f–king crazy because who knows if the lights are gonna come out tomorrow.’ I don’t think about it like that. I just think it was something that just happened to me,” he said. “It definitely makes you appreciate being alive, that’s for sure, when you go through that situation.”
He continued, “Now, knowing that I had no control over that, it’s just something that could happen out of the blue, you wake up and you go, ‘S–t. OK, I’m here.’”