Ronnie McDowell gave the country music world one heck of a scare back in June when he suffered a stroke onstage while performing at a music festival in Pennsylvania.
The 75-year-old recently underwent a procedure to clear plaque from an artery in his neck, but even before the procedure he was already back out and performing. It has been clear that he is one tough dude, but in a recent interview with Taste of Country he revealed what saved his life. McDowell said doctors in Pennsylvania allowed him to leave the hospital there and go home to arrange a surgery because of it, too.
“(The doctor) said, ‘I’m gonna let you go home, and let me tell you why,” he told Taste of Country.
“I’ve been doing this 30-something years,” he said the doctor continued. “I listened to your heart, and you’ve got the strongest heart I have ever heard.”
McDowell said the doctor old him, “That’s what saved you.”
“Because you were 70, almost 80 percent blocked,’ McDowell said the doctor told him. “He said, ‘Your heart was pumping through that really hard, and it scraped the plaque off.”
McDowell told the outlet he has spent his life eating right and trying to be healthy, and that was not the case with all of his bandmates.
“They would (say), ‘Oh, Ronnie’s on a diet, we’re all gonna starve,” he said. “And guess what: They’re all dead. They’re gone. Because of lifestyle. Smoking and overeating, drinking too much, drugging, smoking weed, all the crazy stuff. And one of them was my little brother.”
McDowell told Taste of Country he had a rough couple of days where “I couldn’t put a sentence together,” before his stroke.
“I thought, ‘What in Gold’s name is wrong with my brain? It won’t connect,’” he said.
Still, he said he wanted to do the Summer Solstice Music Festival in Oley. But during the show, he said he started slurring and forgetting his words. His son, Ronnie McDowell Jr., stopped the show to ask him if he was OK.
“And I said, ‘No, I think I’m having a stroke,” McDowell told Taste of Country.
That led to the singer being rushed to the hospital and embarking on what has been a remarkable recovery.
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