Madrid
The accident that Joaquín Sabina suffered yesterday, which in a scare has passed to a more serious but controlled problem, joins a long series of medical episodes that at 71, just yesterday, make him have a more precarious state of health than normal for his age.
The fall of last night at the Wizink Center, when it offered a concert with Joan Manuel Serrat, was a tremendous scare that seemed to remain in that because the first news spoke of three fissures in the left shoulder.
But this morning, and after spending the night quiet, he was struck by a blow to the head that has caused a brain clot that has finally had to be operated, with satisfactory results.
It is the last chapter of a long series of incidents that have forced him to stay away from the stage at many times in recent years, starting with the stroke that took him to the hospital in 2001.
It was on August 23 of that year when he suffered a mild ischemic stroke accident where he was admitted to the same Ruber hospital in which he has been operated today.
At that time he was admitted just three days and a week later he sent an email thanking the attention given and said: “I am alive and well, good of the three legs and both hands.”
But what that scare did to him was to reformulate his habits after a life of excesses to, in general, “abuse himself much less”.
This was indicated a year later, in an interview with Efe for the publication of “Tell me on the street” (2002), when he confessed his concern about “getting old, about health” and why “women” don’t want him.
For a few years, the singer stayed further away from public life and his health recovered, but in September 2010 the problems returned and he had to suspend his appointment at the Palau de Barcelona due to a domestic fall.
Again in May 2011 he canceled his first three concerts in the United States – New York, Miami and Los Angeles – due to intestinal problems, which the musician himself attributed to an “acute diverticulitis.”
Another medical episode that is not entirely clear refers to July 2013, when he canceled his participation in a wine event in the Zaragoza town of Cariñena due to a “dizziness”, perhaps due to “the heat,” said his surroundings.
In December 2014, another incident occurred at the Wizink Center in Madrid, a scenario that has become one of his nightmares.
Sabina aborted the show at two hours, a few songs from the end. In subsequent statements to Efe he blamed him for stomach problems, although at first he claimed that he had suffered a stage panic crisis, “a Pastora Soler” – in reference to the cause that temporarily separated Sevillian from the stage, something for what then apologized.
When that version was still maintained and another concert in Madrid was in danger only a few days later, his representative revealed that this was not the first time Sabina feared to pass out in front of the public, since about three years before in Tijuana (Mexico) he had had a similar picture.
“It was thought that it could be something of the heart, he suspended and the next day he made a memorable concert,” he told Efe.
In June 2015, he canceled two concerts in the Canary Islands due to tendonitis in his left foot, a condition that had forced him to resort to a cane.
The good fortune of “I deny everything”, the second best-selling album in Spain in 2017 and the first of his solo discography since “Vinegar and Roses” (2009), did not accompany Sabina on her tour.
In March 2017 he had to reschedule the dates of his concerts in Latin America due to an operation for a ventral hernia.
In February 2018, he suspended two other concerts in Mexico “due to a blow to the eye, with severe bruising and swelling”, which was caused by a “small dizziness” due to “some discomfort in one ear”.
And on April 21 of that year he was admitted to be a thrombophlebitis in the ileofemoral vein of his left leg. Therefore, four concerts that were relocated to the tail of the tour had to be suspended, after Madrid, the four that were not finally held, also due to a medical problem.
The penultimate health episode was again at the Wizink Center on June 16, 2018, when it interrupted the concert at the hour and a half of acting; according to the medical part it was because of “acute dysphonia due to a viral process”.
“You are not seeing a good concert on my part today,” he said midway through the show, a few minutes before his friend and partner Pancho Varona apologized for his departure from the stage, “totally mute,” and a few minutes after Sabina himself joked that part of this “endless tour” had been “going through corridors of sordid hospitals.”
Yesterday, the performance was even shorter. He hadn’t started singing what was going to be the third song of the night he shared with Serrat.
In the dark on the stage, with a powerful spotlight that illuminated him, Sabina pronounced one of his usual monologues and spoke of the bodies of sub-Saharan in the Mediterranean. He stepped forward and literally disappeared.
He fell into the pit on the front of the stage, giving what today his representative has described as “brutal blow.”
He reappeared shortly after in a wheelchair: “With all the pain in my heart I am going to go to the hospital because my shoulder is very, very, very sore,” he explained to the expectant audience.
“These things only happen to me in Madrid. I am very sorry, ”said the jienense before disappearing to the hospital where he has been operated today.
One more example that corroborates some words that Sabina said in an interview with Efe. “When they are told that getting old is a fantastic thing, because experience and wisdom… They lie like Bellacos. Aging is a fucking shit. ”
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