Last year was not a very good year for Of Mice & Men frontman Austin Carlile. A few days before their spring 2015 tour was to wrap up, the singer was hospitalized and later underwent heart surgery to deal with ongoing issues brought on by Marfans Syndrome. After undergoing the surgery, and even having a misfortune event when he was electrocuted in September, Carlile and company are back on the touring circuit.
During a recent sit down with Metal Hammer, the frontman opened up about everything that has happened since the surgery and how he was clinically dead for a couple of hours.
“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through. It’s hard to go through something like that that’s dangerous in general, and just to not know if you’re gonna be there, four, five or six hours later. When I had my heart surgery, my heart was stopped. They put my head in a whole thing of ice, to stop your brain activity, you’re dead. I was clinically dead for three hours while they did the procedure,” he explains.
“There’s so much stuff going through my head. Like, ‘Am I going to see my mum? What’s going to happen?’ Like, who knows, I was kind of excited. But the one thing I remember right before I went under, and before they put in the relax sedative into you, I was just sitting there and my sister and my dad were there and they said goodbye and started wheeling me back. I just remember being so at peace, and I remember saying, ‘Look God, this is in your hands.’ It was out of my hands completely at that point.”
He continues: “I said, ‘I have to have faith that you have a plan for me and you want me to do something with my life. And if you don’t, then it’s just going to end right here. And if it doesn’t, then I need to wake up and do that.'”
With such a serious surgery, it should come as no surprise that the pain post-surgery was just worse. Carlile goes on the explain how the post-surgery pain was probably worse than any of the pain he had felt in his life. He ended up spending two weeks in the hospital working on his recovery and then an additional week-and-a-half fighting pneumonia.
But all that is now a thing in the past as Carlile has returned to the stage, just like the group has promised at the end of 2015. In addition to their slew of current tour dates with Slipknot and Marilyn Manson and then their own headlining gigs in Europe, the California-based band also confirmed the release of their fourth studio album.
Cold World and is set to be released on Sept. 9 through Rise Records.
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