Celebrity pastor T.D. Jakes has revealed that the serious medical emergency he experienced last year was a heart attack.
He shared this in an exclusive interview on TODAY.
"I didn't really realize what was happening to me onstage until I got to the hospital in an ambulance and fussing that it happened onstage, by the way, because I didn't want it to happen, and the doctor leaned over my ear and said, 'You had a massive heart attack,'" Jakes told Craig Melvin on TODAY on March 26.
Bishop T.D. Jakes, who is 67 years old, was delivering a sermon at The Potter's House on November 23, 2024, when he suddenly experienced a medical emergency.
In a video of the incident, Jakes can be seen pausing and shaking after lowering his microphone. Church officials quickly rushed to the stage to assist him before the video ended.
"The reason I didn't realize it was because I had none of the symptoms that they say," Jakes told Craig about the heart attack. "No numbness, no sharp pain, no anything. I just kind of drifted off to sleep. I didn't know what it was, but I almost died.
"(The doctor) said five minutes later, I'd have been dead on arrival," he continued. "The right side of my heart had completely stopped getting blood at all."
Jake was giving a speech on stage when he suddenly had a heart attack and collapsed into a chair.
"As long as I was up preaching, I felt fine," he said. "But when I sat down, the adrenaline dropped, and it exposed the fact that I was preaching with half of my heart closed through a clot. And they had to go get it."
"It’s hard for me to look at that video," he said. "They had to claw the microphone out of my hand. But in my mind, I was in a quiet, peaceful, serene, white-enveloped, cloud-enveloped space.
"I was on my way out," he continued. "Afterwards in retrospect, it was such a privilege to stand on the other side, to get a little glimpse of what it might be like, or at least what it was like in that moment for me. I think it was absolutely amazing."
He also gave thanks for the prayers he received from his congregation and people around the world.
"While they were praying, the surgeons were operating while I was awake," he said. "They never put me to sleep. Technology is amazing."
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