Queen guitarist Brian May says he was 'near death' after suffering heart attack

Brian May talked about his near-death experience after suffering a minor heart attack following a gardening incident earlier this month.

The Queen guitarist recalled the scary experience in a video posted on Instagram on Monday. He said the attack happened after he injured his buttocks in a garden incident. The injury was just part of the "saga" of incidents that happened to him in May.

The 72-year-old musician then revealed that aside from a rip on his gluteus maximus as shown in an MRI, he also had a compressed sciatic nerve. The findings came out during his second MRI, which he had to find out why he was still in pain a week after the garden incident.

"What did we discover but I had a compressed sciatic nerve, quite severely compressed, and that's why I had this feeling that someone was putting a screwdriver in my back the whole time. It was excruciating," May shared, adding, "So finally we started treating the thing for what it was. I'd been putting the ice packs in the wrong place for about 10 days."

Then to his disbelief, doctors discovered that he had three congested arteries. He could not believe the findings because he always thought of himself as healthy given that he bikes, keeps fit, and maintains a good diet.

"That's one side of the story, and I'm a lot better now... But the rest of the story is a little more bizarre and a bit more shocking," May said, adding that the three congested arteries were in danger of blocking the blood supply to his heart.

"Anyway, I had — in the middle of the whole saga of the painful backside — I had a small heart attack," the musician revealed. He said he endured around 40 minutes of pain and chest tightness.

May said the doctors gave him the option to either have open heart surgery or have stents fitted, and he chose the latter. After a successful surgery, he came out "feeling remarkably well" as "if nothing happened." May is thankful that despite being "near-death" he did not die and came out alive to talk about the experience with his fans.