The precise details of Nesmith’s health woes have been scarce since he entered the hospital just before a scheduled gig withfellow Monkee Micky Dolenzin Glenside, Pennsylvania, but the 75-year-old opened up toRolling Stone‘s Andy Greeneabout his road to recovery.
“I was getting weaker and weaker and I couldn’t get my breath,” he says of the days leading up to the procedure. “When we got to Lake Tahoe and then the high altitude of Denver, I couldn’t get out of bed and I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t agonizing. It was just the business of wanting to take a big, deep breath and not being able to do it.”
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“I didn’t collapse to the ground or anything like that, but I couldn’t breathe,” he recalled. “So I sat down until I got my breath and then I realized the breath wasn’t gettable. That marked the end. People knew I couldn’t keep on like this. It was a road to hell.”
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“I was using the words ‘heart attack’ for a while,” he explains of his ailment. “But I’m told now that I didn’t have one. It was congestive heart failure. It has taken me four weeks to climb out of it.”
Now, a month later, he reckons he’s “back to 80 percent” and eyeing a brief tour with his own group, the First National Band, kicking off Sept. 7 in Texas. “I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” he says. “My thinking is clear and I know who I am and where I am. It all feels like a natural healing process.”
source: people.com
