T.D. Jakes breaks his silence on the medical emergency he suffered last year, and revealed that it was actually a massive heart attack— that he was completely unaware of until he went to the hospital.
“The reason I didn’t realize it was because I had none of the symptoms that they say,” Jakes said during an interview with TODAY shared on Wednesday (March 26). “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. The right side of my heart had completely stopped getting blood at all.”
The 67-year-old was preaching on Nov. 23, 2024 at his church home, The Potter’s House, in Dallas, when the incident occurred. Footage of it shows him pausing onstage and shaking as he lowered his microphone. Officials rushed to help him before the video cuts off.
While he was standing and preaching, he felt fine, but the adrenaline wore off once he sat down and succumb to the heart attack.
Jakes shared, “It exposed the fact that I was preaching with half of my heart closed through a clot. And they had to go get it.”
When looking back on the video, he confessed that it’s hard to watch. “In my mind, I was in a quiet, peaceful, serene, white-enveloped, cloud-enveloped space. I was on my way out,” he reflected. “Afterwards in retrospect, it was such a privilege to stand on the other side, to get a little glimpse of what it might be like, or at least what it was like in that moment for me. I think it was absolutely amazing.”
Jakes is grateful for the prayers, the work of the surgeons who operated on him, and expressed that he has no plans to slow down.
At the time of the ordeal, he shared on X, “The event could’ve been fatal if it weren’t for God’s intervention.”
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