Sarah Silverman “Insanely Lucky to Be Alive” After Medical Scare

Sarah Silverman has fully recovered after being hospitalized for epiglottitis, a potentially life-threatening condition caused by inflammation of the epiglottis tissue, she revealed Wednesday in a lengthy Facebook post. 

The actress-comedian explained that she spent one week in the ICU for what she initially believed to be a simple case of sore throat. 

“I was in the ICU all of last week and I am insanely lucky to be alive,” Silverman wrote. “Don’t even know why I went to the doctor, it was just a sore throat. But I had a freak case of epiglottitis.”

Her post continued: “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. (That was me. I’m the one that didn’t die.) It’s a strange dichotomy between, ‘Why me?’ and the other, ‘Why me?'”

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Silverman detailed her experience in the ICU, writing that she underwent a traumatic surgery and woke up with no memory of what had happened. Following the medical procedure, she was unable to speak and had to use a letter board to communicate.

“They had to have my hands restrained to keep me from pulling out my breathing tube. My friend Stephanie said I kept writing ‘was I in an accident?'” she recalled. “When I woke up 5 days later I didn’t remember anything. I thanked everyone at the ICU for my life, went home, and then slowly as the opiates faded away, remembered the trauma of the surgery & spent the first two days home kind of free-falling from the meds / lack of meds and the paralyzing realization that nothing matters. Luckily that was followed by the motivating revelation that nothing matters.”

Despite the gravity of the news, Silverman went on to end her post in true comedic fashion by sharing a funny anecdote from her stay at the hospital.

“My loved ones stood there, so curious what was going to be the first thing I had to say,” she wrote. “They followed my finger, rapt, as I pointed from letter to letter until I finally spelled out, ‘Did you see ‘Hello My Name Is Doris.'”

Read Silverman’s post in full below.