Kim Petersen, better known as his horror-clad alter ego King Diamond, has made a career for himself singing about lurking terrors and gruesome murders. In December of 2010, Diamond underwent triple-bypass heart surgery and came out of the procedure healthy enough to make a full recovery over the coming years.
Now with a new album underway, his first since 2007's Give Me Your Soul… Please, Diamond has turned to his surgical experiences for lyrical inspiration. Exactly how terrifying can the initial awakening and recovery process be from a surgery like that? According to Diamond in an interview with Noisey, awful and then some.
"When I came to after the surgery, I was lying in the hospital bed and I could only see in black-and-white, and I felt like I was being choked to death slowly. It was the breathing tube, and it was the worst feeling I’ve ever felt. Before I went under they told me that if I felt like I could breathe on my own when I woke up, I should try and signal that to them. But there was no one there when I woke up. My wife was actually there, but I couldn’t see her. I was about to go into a panic, like I was dying, so I started to try and pull the tube out of my mouth. My wife saw me and stopped me and called for the nurses to come. Three of them came in and they were leaning over me, like that camera angle when someone is in a spaceship and the aliens are ready to do experiments on you. But it was all still black-and-white. It was so strange. And instead of helping me, they tied me down to the bed. I couldn’t communicate with them, but if they could have heard me, they would have heard me pleading for them to kill me."
Aside from essentially living Metallica's "One" post-surgery, Diamond explained that things didn't get much better after the breathing tubes were removed and he was learning to walk again.
"I actually got to go home a little earlier than most people who have the surgery because [King’s wife] Livia was helping to clean my wounds—she did some of that work for them so they could see she could do it at home. And then I had to prove I could breathe on my own. I basically had to learn to breathe again, to be strong enough in the lungs to blow this little plastic ball up in a tube before they would let me go home. They had to collapse my lungs for the surgery, and they needed to see that they wouldn’t re-collapse in my sleep again. So I had to train myself and get that plastic ball up. I also had to prove I could walk, so my life became like re-living that line from the song 'The Graveyard'—'walking the halls at night.' When Livia would leave the hospital at two or three in the morning, I’d walk down the hall with her and then go from nurse station to nurse station all night long. I didn’t sleep well because I still had tubes going into my side and I was having nightmares all the time. Eventually I got to go home, but it was a rollercoaster.
Diamond said the experience was so traumatic he doubted at times if the whole thing wasn't a dream and would even ask his wife if she could feel him touching her just to make sure he was in fact alive. Obviously it's one thing to sing about ghouls and helplessness, but living it for a period of time had to instill Diamond with an entirely different perspective.
In the end of the interview, he tells Noisey he'll "never be 100-percent again" but feels like his voice has gotten much better after he quit smoking. He also alludes to going up and down stairs on his upcoming tour, using that as a way of saying how much better he's been! Hard as a damn diamond, that man.
