Joshua Bassett is opening up about a very close call he experienced earlier this year.
In January, just hours after releasing his single “Lie Lie Lie,” the High School Musical: The Musical: The Series actor revealed to fans that he was in the hospital and had to undergo emergency surgery.
“welp… not the first place i assumed i’d be on my Lie Lie Lie release day… the ER!! (before you ask, no it’s not covid.),” Joshua captioned a video of him in a hospital gown lying on a hospital bed posted on Instagram.
“after an unknown, uncomfortable feeling turned into, times 10, the worst pain of my life, i figured i’d just try to sleep,” he shared at the time. “after multiple, very very ugly days and nights, i had no choice today but be taken to the hospital.”
Sharing an update a few days later, he assured fans that he’s “feeling much better” and was “getting very excellent care,” adding that he’s “definitely on the mend.”
However, it wasn’t until recently that Joshua revealed what actually led to his hospitalization then – and how grave his health condition was at the time.
In a new interview with GQ, he revealed that he suffered from septic shock and heart failure.
According to him, he initially thought it was a case of food poisoning – but he wasn’t feeling better.
“[I] started getting very ill, and it kept getting worse,” the songwriter shared with the magazine. “I thought it was, like, food poisoning or whatever. It got worse, it got worse, it got worse, it got worse.”
“[The doctors] told me that I had a 30 percent chance of survival,” he continued. “They told me that if I had not checked into the hospital within 12 hours, I would have been found [dead] in my apartment.”
His time in the hospital was also around when the internet was buzzing with rumors and theories of a supposed love triangle involving him, Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo. But he wasn’t really paying attention to it at the time though because he “didn’t have any energy to be able to focus on anything but staying alive.”
However, he did address the issue elsewhere in the interview.
“People don’t know anything they’re talking about,” he said. “The hardest thing” has been “biting my tongue in a lot of ways, but the reality is it’s kind of like a lost cause trying to talk about any of that stuff and I refuse to feed into any of the bulls–t, so I just don’t.”
“[Everyone] is asking me about Sabrina and Olivia,” Joshua added. “Why don’t we focus on these women for who they are? Let’s focus on the art that they’re making and how great they are instead of their relationship to a boy.”
