During an interview on TODAY, Bishop T.D. Jakes revealed that the life-threatening medical emergency he suffered last year was a heart attack.
“I didn’t really realize what was happening to me onstage until I got to the hospital in an ambulance and fussing that it happened onstage, by the way, because I didn’t want it to happen, and the doctor leaned over my ear and said, ‘You had a massive heart attack,’” Jakes told Craig Melvin said Wednesday (March 26).
First described as a “slight health incident” in an online statement by The Potters’ House, he was rushed to an Texas hospital after he experienced a medical emergency while delivering a sermon in late November. Jakes says things were far more serious.
“The reason I didn’t realize it was because I had none of the symptoms that they say,” Jakes said while reflecting on the heart attack. “No numbness, no sharp pain, no anything. I just kind of drifted off to sleep. I didn’t know what it was, but I almost died.
“(The doctor) said five minutes later, I’d have been dead on arrival,” he continued. “The right side of my heart had completely stopped getting blood at all.”
Jakes said the November 2024 clip, which made rounds across the web and social media, remains difficult to watch.
“It’s hard for me to look at that video,” he said. “They had to claw the microphone out of my hand. But in my mind, I was in a quiet, peaceful, serene, white-enveloped, cloud-enveloped space.”