Ozzy Osbourne - Trust Me, I’m Dr. Ozzy

The fact that I’m still alive ain’t the only reason why I decided to become Dr. Ozzy, though. I’ve also seen literally hundreds of doctors and shrinks over my lifetime—and I’ve spent well over a million dollars on them, which is fucking ridiculous—to the point where I’m convinced that I know more about being a doctor than some doctors do. And it’s not just ’cos of the insane lifestyle I’ve led. I’m also a terrible hypochondriac. I’ll catch a disease off the telly, me. Being ill is like a hobby. I’ve even started to diagnose my own diseases with the help of the Internet (or I should say my assistant Tony, who does all the technical stuff, ’cos I ain’t exactly Stephen fuckHawking when it comes to using a computer).

Of course, the question I always get is, “If you’re such a hypochondriac, Ozzy, how could you have taken all those drugs over the years?” But the thing is, when you have an addictive personality like mine, you never think anything bad’s gonna happen. It’s like, “Oh, well, I didn’t do as much as so-and-so: I didn’t drink as much as him, didn’t do as much coke, etcetera, etcetera…” Now, that might be fine in theory, but in my case, the “so-and-so” was usually a certified lunatic like John Bonham. Or, even worse, Mel Gibson. Which meant they’d put enough up their noses to blast off into outer fucking space. Another thing I’d always tell myself was, “Oh, a doctor gave me the drugs, and he must know what he’s doing.” But that was ignoring the fact that I’d administered the stuff myself, usually at five hundred times the recommended dosage. It’s honestly a miracle I didn’t end up like Michael Jackson, or any number of other tragic rock ’n’ roll cases. In fact, my friends knew me as “Dr. Ozzy” for years before I started giving advice professionally, ’cos I was like a walking pharmacy. I remember in the 1980s, a good mate of mine came to me for help with his leg ache, so I went to get my “special suitcase,” pulled out a pill the size of a golf ball, and said, “Here, take one of these.” It was Ibuprofen, before you could buy it over-the-counter in Britain. He came back a few hours later and said, “Wow! Dr. Ozzy, you cured me!” The only problem was that I gave him enough to cure an elephant. The bloke didn’t shit or sleep for two months.

He didn’t thank me so much for that .

But it ain’t just medication I’ve given to my friends. As insane as it sounds, a lot of people have come to me for family advice. I suppose it’s ’cos they saw me raising Jack and Kelly during The Osbournes , and they think I’m like an undead Bill Cosby or something. They ask me stuff like, “How do I get my kids to have safe sex?” or “How do I talk to them about drugs?” I’m happy to help the best I can. The only trouble is, when I talked to my kids about drugs, it was, (a) “Where’s your stash?” and (b) “Can I have some please?”

I’ve become a better father since then. I mean, during the worst days of my addiction, I wasn’t really a father at all, I was just another one of Sharon’s kids. But I’m a different person now: I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t get high—or least not on anything but endorphins from the jogging machine. Which means I enjoy my family more than ever: not just my five amazing kids (two of them to my first wife), but also my five grandkids. Plus, after thirty years, my marriage to Sharon is stronger than ever.

So I must be doing something right.

When you live full-time in Los Angeles, like I’ve done for the past few years, you often feel that people spend so much time trying to save their lives, they don’t live them. I mean, at the end of the day, we’re all going to die, one way or another. So why kill yourself with worry?

For me, though, the decision to change my life wasn’t really about my health. It was about the fact that I wasn’t having fun any more. As I used to say, I’d put the “wreck” into recreation. I was on Ambien, Klonopin, temazapam, chloral hydrate, alcohol, Percocet, codeine—and that was just on my days off. But morphine was my favourite. I didn’t do it for very long, mind you. Sharon would find me passed out on the kitchen floor with the dog licking my forehead, and she put a stop to it. And thank God she did: I’d have kicked the bucket a long time ago otherwise. But it was tobacco that really put me over the edge. I’m a singer, that’s how I earn a living, but I’d get a sore throat, then cough my way through a pack of Marlboro full-strength, to the point where I had to cancel gigs. It was ridiculous; the stupidest fucking habit you could ever imagine. So cigarettes were the first thing I quit, and that started the ball rolling. Now I take drugs only for real things, like high cholesterol and heartburn.

I can understand—sort of—if people think it’s more rock ’n’ roll to die young. But what really winds me up is when you hear, “Oh, my great-aunt Nelly smoked eighty cigarettes a day and drank sixteen pints of Guinness before going to bed every night, and she lived until she was 103.” I mean, yeah, that happens. My own gran lived until she was 99. But the odds ain’t exactly on your side. Especially not when you get to the age of 62, like me.

Another thing that puts a bee up my arse: people who never get check-ups, and never go to the doctor, even when they’re half-dead. It ain’t macho—it’s fucking pathetic. I had my prostate checked just the other week, for example, ’cos I’m on a three-year plan for prostate and colon tests. I couldn’t believe how many of my male friends said to me, “Your prostate? What’s that ?” I was like, “Look, women get breast cancer, and blokes get cancer of the prostate.” One guy even asked me, “Where is it?” I told him, “Up your arse,” and he went, “So how do they check that then?” I said to him, “How do you think they check it? It starts with a rubber glove and ends with your voice rising ten octaves.”

My prostate guy here in California says that every man over the age of 50 will develop some kind of prostate problem as they get older, but only half will get tested. And yet nowadays you can cure prostate cancer, no problem at all, if you get to it early enough. It’s the same with colon cancer. Don’t get me wrong: I’m the first to admit that the preparation for the colon cancer test ain’t exactly glamorous. They give you this horrendous liquid to drink, then you have to crap through the eye of a needle until your backside is so clean, if you open your mouth, you can see daylight at the other end. But it’s only ’cos I got tested for colon cancer that my wife did the same—and her test came back positive. Thanks to that, they caught the cancer in time, and she’s alive today. That’s a huge deal. So when I first became Dr. Ozzy, my first message was: “Don’t be ignorant!” To men, in particular, I wanted to say: I don’t think a doctor’s never put his finger up a bloke’s ass before. They do it every day, so get over yourself. Besides, what would you rather have, a strange man’s finger up your arse on a Monday morning—or the sound of a pine box being nailed shut over your head?

Having said that, every case is different—which I realized very quickly when I became Dr. Ozzy. For example, after reassuring my readers that they had to nothing to fear from dropping their trousers in front of their GP, I got an e-mail from a guy called Geoff in London.

He wrote:

Dear Dr. Ozzy:

After hurting my rear-end end while squatting down to tile a floor, I asked my GP to take a look at it. He ummed-and-ahh’ed for a while, then sent me off to a local teaching hospital, where a very excited specialist said he need to perform an examination. After giving me one of those back-to-front robes to wear, he lay me down on a slab on my side, and proceeded to round up some 20 junior doctors, who then took turns to file past my exposed behind, scribbling notes and snapping photographs as they went. Their verdict after that what seemed like ten lifetimes? I had a rare “perianal haematoma”… which would go away by itself.