Trust Me, I’m Dr. Ozzy

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.

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