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

All I can say is: sorry, Geoff. If it’s any consolation, I once mooned a crowd of about half a million people at a gig, so you certainly don’t hold the world record for having the largest number of people gazing up your asshole at any particular time. That one belongs to me .

To be honest with you, I can still hardly believe the stuff people write to me about. One guy asked if he should cut down on his cocaine use—’cos he’d just found out that he had high cholesterol. Another time, a girl in America—she was 22—asked if it was okay to sleep with her mum’s (younger) boyfriend, or if that would make things weird at family get-togethers. I mean, what’s wrong with these people? And as you’ll see when you read on, that ain’t even the half of it. Sometimes even Dr. Ozzy is lost for words.

When it comes to routine stuff, though, I pretty much always know the right answers. That’s the thing about being a worrier, especially a worrier who’s a hypochondriac: you end up investigating every last ache and twinge, so over time, all these random facts end up sticking in your head. If only I could remember lyrics so easily.

I wasn’t always a such hypochondriac, mind you. When I was growing up in Aston, for example, our family GP was a guy called Dr. Rosenfield, and I’d do anything to get out of an appointment with him—mainly ’cos his receptionist was a woman with a full-on beard. I ain’t kidding you: a big, black, bushy beard. It freaked me out. She was like Captain Pugwash in a frock. And Dr. Rosenfield’s office was so gloomy, you felt worse coming out of that place than you did when you went in. As for Dr. Rosenfield himself, he wasn’t really a bad guy, but he wasn’t exactly a comforting figure, either. I remember falling out of a tree one time when I was stealing apples: I hit a branch on the way down, and my eye swelled up like a big black balloon. When I got home my old man smacked me around the ear before sending me off to get my injury looked at—then Dr. Rosenfield smacked me around the ear, too. I couldn’t believe it.

I rarely got any kind of proper medical care in those days. If one of the six Osbourne kids had an earache, they’d get a spoonful of hot vegetable fat down their earhole. That was the done thing. And my gran would give us milk and mutton fat for bronchitis. As for my father, he had this tin in his shed, I don’t know what it was, some kind of black greasy stuff, and if you got a boil on your neck he’d go, “ I’ll get rid of that for yer, son, heh-heh-heh, ” and he’d slap it on there, and you’d be like, “NOT THE BLACK TIN! NOOO!” But that’s all my folks could afford. Shelling out on zit cream from the chemist wasn’t gonna happen when they could barely afford to get food on the table.

My father was one of those people who’d never see a doctor. He’d never take a take off work at the factory, either. He’d have to have been literally missing a limb to call in sick—even then, he’d probably just hop into the factory, like nothing had happened. I don’t think he got a single check-up, right up until the end of his life—and by that time, he was riddled with cancer. His prostate gave up first, though. I don’t know why he’d avoided doctors—it was all free on the NHS—but it made me think the opposite way. My logic is, if I go to the doctor now, and there’s something wrong with me, they’ll catch it, and I’ll get to live another day. Don’t get me wrong: I ain’t afraid of dying. Although it would be good to know where it’s gonna happen, so I could avoid going there….

Sometimes I think people in Britain don’t make enough use of the NHS, because they’re too busy complaining about it. But Americans—who’ll queue up outside a sports arena for three days just to go to a free clinic—can’t believe the deal we Brits get. I’ll never forget the first time I got an X-ray done in the US after my quad-bike crash. The doc came into the room, holding up my slide, and whistling through his teeth. “How much did all that cost you, huh?” he asked, seeing all the rods and bolts holding my neck and back together. “A couple of mill? Three, four? Are you still getting the bills?”

“Actually, it was free,” I told him. “I had the accident in England.”

I almost had to call for a nurse, he got such a shock.

If you’re a celebrity, mind you, medical care in America is just incredible. Too much so, if you’re an addict like me, because they’ll hand out pills like you’re in a shopping mall. Whenever I do a gig in the US, for example, I’ll always have a doctor check me out before the show, and in the bad old days, I’d score just about anything I wanted off those guys. At one point I basically just bought my own doctor and installed him in my house, salary and everything. It was magic until Sharon got wind of it. In England, I used to have to make up a backache, or hit myself over the head with a lump of wood, if I wanted to get a Vicodin. In America, all I had to do was say the word. It stopped only when the doctors realised that they had to answer to the Voice of God—ie, my wife.

“If you give him ONE more dodgy pill, you’ll be the one who needs a doctor,” she’d say.

To be fair to the American doctors, they do come up with some mind-blowing technology. I just had my eyes fixed with Crystalens surgery, for example. I’d suffered from cataracts for years, and my vision was so bad it was starting to give me problems on stage. So what they did was, they took out my natural lens—which was all fogged up—and replaced it with this bionic one, which can focus by itself. Left eye first, then the other a week later. It’s amazing. Just unbelievable. No pain, for starters. And now I can read again. I see over there, over here, it’s just fucking incredible. I’ve no idea how much it cost—probably eight tours, or something—but it’s changed my life, totally.

I’m a new man now, in so many ways. I might be 62, but I haven’t felt so young since the 1960s. Aside from my eyes, the other big change in my life is that I’ve pretty much become a vegetarian. Seriously. It’s my new phase: brown rice and vegetables. I don’t even drink milk, apart from a splash in my tea. And no, it ain’t because of the animals . I mean, I used to work in a slaughterhouse, killing 200 cows a day. I ate a bat, for fuck’s sake. You won’t see me marching over the frozen tundra, hunting down seal-clubbers. I just can’t digest meat anymore. I finally gave it up a few weeks ago, after I went out for a steak with my friend Zakk Wylde. I might as well have sealed my arse with cement, ’cos I couldn’t crap for a week. I love the taste of beef, but it ain’t worth it.

I ain’t into any of that organic bollocks, either. People think they’re buying another day on this earth when they pay for that stuff, so they get ripped off. If you want organic, grow your own, man. I used to when I was married to my first and we had a little cottage in Ranton, Staffordshire. A veggie patch also happens to be a great place to hide your stash of drugs. Having said that, I’d always get stoned and forget where I’d buried the stuff. One time, I spent a whole week down the garden, trying to find a lump of Afghan hash. The missus thought I was just really worried about my carrots.

I suppose when people hear stories like that, they might think I’m too much of a bad example to give advice. I wouldn’t argue—and I’d hate for anyone to think, “Oh, if Ozzy survived all that outrageous behaviour, then so can I.” But d’you know what? If people can learn from my stupid shit without having to repeat any of it; or if they can take some comfort from the crazy, fucked-up things my family has been through over the years; or if just hearing me talk about colonoscopies makes them less embarrassed about getting tested for colon cancer, that’s more than enough for me: Dr. Ozzy’s job will be done.