Brian May: Queen guitarist was ‘very near death’ after suffering heart attack

Queen guitarist was taken to hospital midway through recovery from a gardening accident

Brian May has said he was recently taken to hospital after suffering a heart attack.

The Queen guitarist revealed that doctors found him to be “very near death” after discovering three blocked arteries, which caused a pain in his chest that lasted 40 minutes.

May, 72, told his Instagram followers that the pain began shortly after ripping his buttock muscles in a gardening accident a few weeks back.

“In the middle of the whole saga of the painful backside, I had a small heart attack,” he said.

“I say small – it’s not something that did me any harm. It was about 40 minutes of pain in the chest and tightness and that feeling in the arms and sweating.”

May continued: “To cut a long story short, my wonderful doctor drove me to the hospital himself and I went straight into what they call the ‘CAT room’ I think and I had an angiogram, and that’s when they stick something in your wrist and it goes all the way up to your heart and into arteries in your heart, and it can find out in a way that nothing else can.”

During the angiogram, doctors found the arteries “that were congested and in danger of blocking the supply of blood” to his heart.

May said he turned down open heart surgery and instead opted to have three stents put in.

Speaking about the many headlines and Twitter jokes made about his buttock injury, May said: “I didn’t realise that was amusing really.

"I kind of forgot that anything to do with the bum people find amusing, so I got a bit p****d off with all the ‘Brian May gets a pain in the bum’ kind of stuff.”

May, who is also an astrophysicist, said in April that he believed coronavirus was caused by too many people eating meat.

“I think it’s time to re-examine our world in a way that doesn’t abuse other species,” he said.