Ozzy Osbourne is speaking about being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
During a “Good Morning America” interview Tuesday, the Prince of Darkness and his wife Sharon Osbourne shared the details.
“It’s Parkin’s II, which is a form of Parkinson’s,” Sharon explained. “There’s so many different type of Parkinson’s. It’s not a death sentence by any stretch of the imagination, but it does affect certain nerves in your body.”
Although fans have known Ozzy has suffered from tremors and was diagnosed with Parkin symptoms in the early 2000s, the former Black Sabbath star said he didn’t find out about his diagnosis until 2019.
“I’m not good at secrets, I cannot walk around with it anymore,” he said. “I feel better now of owning up to the fact that I have a case of Parkinson’s.”
“[Last year] has been terribly challenging for us all,” Ozzy said, recalling his “bad fall” in February 2019.
”I had to have surgery on my neck which screwed all my nerves in,” he said. “I’ve got numbness down this arm from the surgery. My legs feel going cold, I don’t know if that’s Parkinson’s or what... It’s a weird feeling.”
He added that he’s on a “really low dose” of medication.
Sharon added that it’s hard for doctors to differentiate which of Ozzy’s symptoms are coming from his surgery and which are from his diagnosis.
“We’ve kind of reached a point here, in this country, where we can’t go any further because we’ve got all the answer we can get here,” she said. ”So in April, we’re going to a professor in Switzerland.”
In the latter part of the interview, GMA’s Robin Roberts spoke with Ozzy’s children Kelly and Jack.
”The hardest thing is watching somebody you love suffer,” Kelly said. “It’s kind of become a bit of a role reversal for us, where we have to be like, snap out of it, come on, we have to all admit what’s happening here.”
.@ABC NEWS EXCLUSIVE: “The hardest thing is watching someone you love suffer.” Rock legend @OzzyOsbourne’s kids @JackOsbourne and @KellyOsbourne open up about their family’s new normal after their father’s Parkinson's diagnosis. https://t.co/tYd0K3rQet pic.twitter.com/8ayAFwOi9M
— Good Morning America (@GMA) January 21, 2020
Jack could sympathize with his father’s health struggles, having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2012.
”I understand when you have something you don’t want to have,” he said. “I don’t push it, if he wants to talk about it, he talks about it.”
Read more at usatoday.com
