JUDAS PRIEST guitarist Richie Faulkner has once again opened up about the life-saving surgery he underwent a year and a half ago.
On September 26, 2021, the now-43-year-old British-born musician suffered an acute cardiac aortic dissection during a performance at the Louder Than Life festival, just a short distance from Rudd Heart and Lung Center at UofL Health – Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. It took the hospital’s cardiothoracic surgery team, led by Dr. Siddharth Pahwa and also including Drs. Brian Ganzel and Mark Slaughter, approximately 10 hours to complete the surgery, an aortic valve and ascending aorta replacement with hemiarch replacement.
Asked in a new interview with DJ Force X if he has had to make any lifestyle changes, such as medication, diet and exercise, after his surgery, Richie said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I’m very lucky. I keep saying it — I’m very lucky; I’m very fortunate. It’s medication for the rest of my life. And I have to watch how many greens I eat, funny enough. ‘Cause my heart’s fine. I have to watch how thick my blood is. I’ve got a mechanical valve, so it means I have to make sure that my blood is thin enough to go through the valve but not too thin that I bleed out if I cut myself. So eating greens thickens your blood, because of vitamin K in it, so that’s the stuff I’ve gotta be careful of, crazily enough.
“Again, people lose their limbs, they lose their eyes — people lose a lot more than what I’ve got to go through. So, again, I’m incredibly fortunate,” he said.
“It’s a challenge sometimes, and it’s something I’ve gotta live with for the rest of my life, but in comparison to what other people have to go through, it’s nothing, and I’m very lucky just to have to deal with that.”
Last September, Faulkner revealed that he underwent a second heart surgery in early August 2022. He later explained to “That Fuzzing Rock Show”: “They found something just before the European leg [of JUDAS PRIEST‘s world tour]. And it was basically a hole in the repair and there was a leak — I’d basically sprung a leak in there — and it was causing a sack to form around my heart. So they found it just before the European leg. And the surgeon said it was okay for me to do Europe, [so] I was actually touring Europe, playing Europe with this sack and a leak inside there. What that meant was when I got back from Europe, two days later I was back in the hospital for another open-heart surgery. So, again, the surgeons and the doctors, they were all saying that it was enough recovery time to be able to recover before the next group of dates mid-October… There was a festival in Sacramento [Aftershock] that we had to bow out of, ’cause I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I needed that eight or nine weeks recovery time. That’s why we had to pull that festival. So, yeah, I’m doing well — feeling strong, feeling healthy. But yeah, it was a bit daunting, to be honest, to be touring Europe knowing that that was going on. But you’ve gotta put your trust in the doctors, and it worked out okay.”
Two weeks after his first surgery, Faulkner told reporters that he experienced a sharp pain as he was stepping off the stage. “That’s when it exploded,” he said.
“The more I read about it, the more astonishing it is to me to think that I even made it to the hospital,” he added. “The amount of time when I actually go the pain and when I turned up in the hospital and when we were actually operating, it was quite a lot of time. The more I read about it, the more unbelievable — that amount of time — I don’t know how I’m still around today.”
Pahwha told reporters that the chance of survival for anybody with Faulkner‘s ailment is about 10%.
“There are about 70% to 80% patients who have their aorta ruptured and never make it to the hospital,” said Pahwa.
Aortic aneurysms are “balloon-like bulges in the aorta, the large artery that carries blood from the heart through the chest and torso,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Dissections happen when the “force of blood pumping can split the layers of the artery wall, allowing blood to leak in between them.”
After Louder Than Life, JUDAS PRIEST postponed the remainder of the U.S. dates on its 50th-anniversary tour, dubbed “50 Heavy Metal Years”. The shows were rescheduled for March and April 2022.
Faulkner joined PRIEST in 2011 as the replacement for original guitarist K.K. Downing.
Richie was once the guitarist in the backing group for Lauren Harris, daughter of IRON MAIDEN bassist Steve Harris.
