This week, Bam Margera opened up to his fellow Jackass alum Steve-O about his recent drug relapse and subsequent hospitalization with COVID-19 on Steve-O’s Wild Ride! podcast.
Last month, TMZ reported Margera was hospitalized with pneumonia and COVID and had been put on a ventilator. The celebrity tabloid noted Margera had been in and out of rehab throughout 2022 after he completed a one-year treatment for drug and alcohol abuse.
To Steve-O on Thursday (Jan. 5), Margera recalled his latest hospital stay with his typical humor. Watch the full interview down toward the bottom of this post.
“I basically was pronounced dead,” Margera tells Steve-O, saying he “did not know that I had like gnarly COVID — my body was shutting down. I went into four seizures, each one lasting 10–20 minutes. And on the fourth one, I bit my tongue so hard it was like nearly falling off. It got so swollen and puffy, it wouldn’t fit in my mouth. And I was drinking the infected blood, which gave me pneumonia as well.”
He continues, “[At] the hospital, I went into my fifth seizure, and I couldn’t breathe without a tube down my throat. So I woke up five days later, thinking I was there for a couple of hours. They’re like, ‘Dude, you’ve been here for nearly a week. We tried to take the tube out, and you weren’t breathing on your own.’ So I spent 8 days there. And, dude, when they took that tube out, I felt like I sucked on Darth Vader’s dick.”
Going into the troubles that led to his hospitalization, Margera discussed his apprehension in Florida that preceded one of his rehab stays. In an apparent misunderstanding, he said that him missing his son was mistaken for genuine suicidal feelings.
“What I said was, ‘I haven’t seen my son in 200 days. If he’s not on that airplane, I’m gonna jump off a building,'” he explains. “They’re like, ‘Put your hands behind your back.’ I’m like, ‘For what?’ They’re like, ‘You’re gonna kill yourself.’ … I’m just saying I miss my kid.”
Margera, the media personality previously known for his stunts and skateboarding tricks, also discussed a particularly dark time in his addiction.
“At one point, I was on so many pills at once that my thing was, I would wake up around 3:00AM [and] sleepwalk till I knocked myself out like fainting or whatever,” he says. “And an ambulance would come, they’d take me to the hospital, check my head, do an MRI [or] CT scan [and] realize that I’m okay. The very next night, same thing, same time — I’d knock myself out sleepwalking. I did this for a week straight.”
Margera first found fame as a skateboarder in underground skate films such as 1999’s CKY and hit peak popularity in the 2000s when he starred in MTV’s Viva La Bam. Margera is also in 25 episodes of the original Jackass TV series, appears in the first three Jackass films and makes a brief cameo in Jackass Forever, the latest Jackass movie. Margera plans to hit the road with Steve-O later this month.
If you or someone you know is struggling with drug and/or alcohol dependence, help is available now through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website. Call 1-800-622-HELP (1-800-622-4357) or send a text to 1-800-487-4889.
Bam Margera on Wild Ride! With Steve-O – Jan. 5, 2023
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