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Just a few weeks ago, rapper Lil Wayne was not in good shape. He was checked into the ICU for six days, reportedly high on sizzurp, but he somehow managed to evade death even though the usually-right-about-celebrities-dying "reporters" at TMZ said he was on his way to higher ground. Now Weezy is telling everyone to relax, and not to worry, he's just epileptic. "The bad news is I'm an epileptic. I'm prone to seizures. This isn't my first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh seizure. I've had a bunch of seizures, ya'll just never hear about them," Wayne told Los Angeles's Power 106 FM. He further explained his recent stay thusly: "But this time it got real bad 'cause I had three of them in a row and on the third one, my heart rate went down to like 30 percent. Basically, I could’ve died, so that is why it was so serious."

So, this is the first time the world is hearing about Wayne's brush with death from the rapper himself, and his version of the hospitalization heard around the world cuts against what we were told at the time: that Wayne more or less overdosed on sizzurp—a mix of prescription strength cough syrup with codeine and soda—and that he was hanging onto life by his fingernails. Even TMZ, which has consistently been the accurate source of news on the death of celebrities like Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, reported that Wayne he was receiving his last rites—a report TMZ later retracted. That did not go over well with Wayne, who compared the celebrity news outlet to his misbehaving children:

That’s what they do. I can’t be upset at that. I get upset at my kids when they do things that I tell them not to do. I can’t be upset at TMZ for doing what they do. They gon’ probably come out tomorrow and say something else about somebody else that ain’t true. That’s what they do. The truth isn’t good enough for them, so they gotta twist everything up.

Wayne's version of the events, of course, does not mention sizzurp—he traced the hospitalization back to his seizure problem, and stress. "[T]he reason being for the seizures is just plain stress, no rest, overworking myself. That's just typical me though." Wayne is planning a 40-show tour, which begins on July 5.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.