*Montel Williams says he’s “blessed to be alive” and has a renewed outlook on life after suffering a life-threatening stroke in late May.
The 61-year-old former talk show host spent 21 days in the hospital following a cerebellar hemorrhagic stroke this summer after an intense workout.
“So I had a weird summer… I had a hemorrhagic stroke on May 31st and were it not for my wife Tara, I’d be dead…,” he wrote on Twitter.
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So I had a weird summer… I had a hemorrhagic stroke on May 31st and were it not for my wife Tara, I’d be dead…
Tomorrow, I’ll see you on GMA and @DrOz. I will NEVER forget all the kindness you all showed my family and I when this happened…https://t.co/WL7jasiqRg
— Montel Williams (@Montel_Williams) October 10, 2018
In this week’s PEOPLE, the 62-year-old Emmy winner reveals for the first time that he survived a rare type of stroke that experts say can either kill or cause severe neurologic deficits in 50 percent of patients.
“I’m very lucky,” Williams says. “When it happened, I didn’t realize the veracity of what this was. When you start thinking about it those statistics? That’s harsh reality. … I’m so blessed to be alive and I’m not taking it for granted.”
via People:
Trouble first started for Williams in the early morning hours of May 30, when he was exercising by himself in the gym of his New York City hotel. But while holding his breath and coming up from weighted squats, Williams heard what he thought was a loud noise coming from behind him.
“I knew there was nobody there and so I looked to my left,” he recalls. “And as my eyes came back around, the whole room started to kaleidoscope and I got hit with the wave of tired.”
“I threw the weight down and said to myself, ‘You just had a stroke.’ ”
Williams was right. That sound he heard was a weakened blood vessel in his brain that had burst, leaking blood toward his cerebellum, which is the part of the brain that controls movement and balance.
Having seen the symptoms of a stroke before on The Dr. Oz Show, Williams immediately knew that he had to act fast. “I said, ‘I’m not dying in this gym alone,’” Williams recalls.
“I wanted to lay down to rest but I kept saying, ‘You can’t lay down’ because I remembered that’s what people die from.”
According to the report, Williams managed to make the journey from the gym, to the elevator, up to his room on the 14th floor where he alerted wife Tara. By the time he got to the hospital, he had a pool of blood the size of a peach on the back of his brain.
“I could barely talk. I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t stand. I was almost paralyzed, it was terrifying,” Williams says. “But I remember telling myself, ‘You’re not dying. You’re not quitting. You’re going to fight this. You’re going to get this back.’
Things have improved since then.
“I’m way ahead of the rehab game right now,” he says. “My physical therapist, Paul Reilly, asked early on, ‘What do you want to get out of this?’ And I said, ‘I’d love to snowboard again this year.’ So we set that goal and we’re almost there. I really need another month before I’m beyond that acute phase of having a stroke. But I made it back. I got it back. And I probably will snowboard in January.”
Williams says this experience taught him the importance of slowing down.
“This gave me a wake-up call in a lot of ways,” he says. “I use to be one of those overly intense people. I was flying three flights a week, cross-country, back here, over there, up there, down there, over there. I was always on the phone, managing five businesses — it’s time to just slow it down a little bit, you know?”
Montel also opened up to GMA’s Robin Roberts about surviving a rare stroke: “It’s a warning that I want to send out.”
WATCH:
.@Montel_Williams opens up to @RobinRoberts about surviving a rare stroke: “It’s a warning that I want to send out.” pic.twitter.com/ECg5kkJmcA
— Good Morning America (@GMA) October 11, 2018
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