Sarah Silverman: I Almost Died Last Week

She was in ICU for five days with epiglottitis
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 7, 2016 5:03 AM CDT
Sarah Silverman: I Almost Died Last Week
Sarah Silverman at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in January.   (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

Sarah Silverman went to the doctor last week with a sore throat. Boy, is she glad she did. "I was in the ICU all of last week and I am insanely lucky to be alive," she writes on Facebook. "Don't even know why I went to the doctor, it was just a sore throat. But I had a freak case of epiglottitis"—a rare swelling of the cartilage lid that covers the windpipe, which can cause asphyxiation in extreme cases, reports Time. "They couldn't put me fully to sleep for the recovery process because my blood pressure's too low. I was drugged just enough to not feel the pain and have no idea what was happening or where I was," she continues.

The 45-year-old comedian woke up five days later thinking she'd been in an accident and soon came to "the paralyzing realization that nothing matters," she writes, per US Weekly. "There's something that happens when three people you're so close to die within a year and then YOU almost die but don't," she adds. However, her family and friends kept her company as she recovered and even shared some funny stories. A friend told Silverman at one point she "stopped a nurse—like it was an emergency—[and] furiously wrote down a note and gave it to her. When she looked at it, it just said, 'Do you live with your mother?' next to a drawing of a penis." (Find out why Silverman recently dressed up as Hitler.)

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