'Unconscious for four days': Madonna’s sepsis battle exposes the deadly infection you might be ignoring

Madonna called herself a ‘superwoman’—but even icons face moments of frightening vulnerability. At 67, she revealed that her toughest battle wasn’t on stage but in a hospital bed. In her first-ever podcast interview, the Queen of Pop admitted she nearly lost her life to sepsis.

What began as a rehearsal for her world tour ended with doctors fighting to keep her alive. Madonna explained that she had contracted a bacterial infection in 2023, which escalated with terrifying speed. ‘I was rehearsing for a tour, and I got a bacterial infection. One minute I was alive and dancing around, and the next minute I was in the ICU, unconscious for four days,’ she recalled.

Initially described as a 48-hour induced coma, Madonna revealed that she had in fact been unconscious for four days while on a ventilator. Doctors confirmed she had sepsis—an aggressive, life-threatening reaction to infection that can kill within hours if untreated. She admitted the speed of her decline was shocking, especially for someone who had always seen herself as invincible.

What made her story even more extraordinary was the vision she claimed to experience while unconscious. She described her late mother appearing to her, asking: ‘Do you want to come with me?’ Madonna said she replied ‘No,’ and her assistant in the hospital room even heard her say it aloud. This moment, she said, deepened her faith and connected her to her Kabbalah practice of ‘radical acceptance.’

Her teacher’s advice became a lifeline: ‘The sooner you accept what’s happening to you and that you don’t know when it’s going to end, the sooner it’s going to end.’ The concept helped her endure a recovery that tested her both physically and emotionally. She confessed she had tried to return to rehearsals but found she had no strength, admitting: ‘I couldn’t get out of bed and I didn’t know when it was going to end.’

For Australians over 60, Madonna’s story carried an important health warning. Sepsis, while little understood by many, can develop rapidly from something as simple as a localised infection. In the U.S., more than 1.7 million adults were affected each year, with around 350,000 deaths. Though equivalent figures were harder to pinpoint in Australia, medical experts stressed that sepsis was equally serious here.

Madonna’s candour about her recovery was a humbling reminder that not everyone regains their full health after such an illness. ‘Some people never recover from it completely, never have their full health again,’ she admitted. For her, the lesson was not just about physical healing but about learning to accept suffering as part of the human experience.

By July 2024, she marked a powerful milestone. On social media she shared: ‘A year ago today, I had just come home from the hospital after surviving a life threatening illness, I could barely stand in my backyard holding one sparkler. I made a miraculous recovery and had an amazing year.’ Months earlier, she had resumed her postponed Celebration Tour in October 2023, transforming it into both a professional triumph and a deeply personal victory.

Her reflections on survival carried a final message: that acceptance did not mean defeat, but resilience. ‘Sitting around feeling sorry for yourself, ‘Oh well, woe is me or poor me.’ I will not accept it. Well, then you’re just going to be swimming in suffering,’ she said.

Madonna’s story is a powerful reminder that even the strongest public figures can be brought to their knees by sudden illness.

Her fight with sepsis highlights how quickly health can shift, forcing even those at the peak of their careers to confront life’s fragility.

In a similar way, another well-known star has opened up about her own unexpected health battle—offering yet another glimpse into the private struggles behind the spotlight.

Read more: From Kath & Kim laughter to hospital struggles—this celebrity opens up about her cancer battle

Have you or a loved one faced a sudden illness that changed your outlook on life?