Madonna's hospitalization in 2023 included a 48-hour medically induced coma due to a bacterial infection.
Madonna is reflecting one year after being discharged from the hospital following a life-threatening illness.
Th4 65-year-old singer took to Instagram with a carousel post that included 10 photos of her celebrating the Fourth of July. But it's in her caption where Madge expressed her appreciation for life following the ordeal last year that landed her in the ICU and a medically-induced coma.
"A year ago today, I had just come home from the hospital after surviving a life threatening illness," she wrote in her caption. "I could barely stand in my backyard holding one sparkler. I made a miraculous recovery and had an amazing year. Thank you God. Life is beautiful! ♥️🧨🔥."
The "Like a Virgin" singer had been hospitalized due to a serious bacterial infection, and her hospital stay included a 48-hour medically induced coma. She reflected on the gravity of her health earlier this year during the first of her five sold-out Celebration World Tour shows at Los Angeles' Kia Forum.
Per Variety, the singer began her nine-minute speech late in the show by telling her audience, "I have fallen off a lot of horses and broken a lot of bones. I have a titanium hip. I mean, the list goes on and on, but nothing can stop me... This summer I had a surprise. It's called a near-death experience."
Admitting that the experience was "pretty scary," she shared that her assistant told her, "the first word I said was 'No.' And I'm pretty sure that God was saying to me, 'Do you wanna come with us? You wanna come with me? You wanna go this way?' And I said, 'No. No.'" She added one more for emphasis: "No!"
The "Material Girl" singer had also previously revealed to her fans thinking she wasn't going to make it out of the traumatic event.
"I didn't think I was going to make it, neither did my doctors. That's why I woke up with all of my children sitting around me," Madonna said at the time. "I forgot five days of my life – or my death. I don't really know where I was. If you want to know my secret and how I pulled through and how I survived, I thought, 'I've got to be there for my children. I have to survive for them.'"
ET spoke to Dr. Justin Fiala, a pulmonary, critical care and sleep specialist at Northwestern Medicine, and he talked about how bacterial infections can become serious.
"It's often commonly thought that they are benign but if left untreated they can actually become quite severe and they are a common reason why people end up in the ICU," Fiala said. "Bacterial infections can even start out relatively benign in theory such as a cut on the skin that looks like a kind of localized infection but if left to just smolder and get worse they can then go to deeper sites into the body and spread and once it spreads that's usually when we're getting patients admitted to the intensive care unit."
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