Madonna is opening up about her "near-death experience" last year and a conversation she had with God after waking up from a four-day induced coma.
The queen of pop, who was hospitalized last year after a serious bacterial infection, recalled the ordeal during a reflective moment onstage at the first of her five sold-out Celebration World Tour shows at Los Angeles' Kia Forum.
"This show every night is not really so hard on me physically. It's hard on me emotionally because I'm really telling you the story of my life. My heart is on my sleeve," she said, according to People. "I've fallen off a lot of horses and broken a lot of bones ... but nothing can stop me."
Madonna, 65, went on to reference her health scare, revealing that the "first word" she said was "No" when she woke up from the coma.
"I'm pretty sure that was God saying to me, 'Do you want to come? Want to come up with me? No,'" Madonna said.
She later recalled a conversation she had with her longtime manager, Guy Oseary, while in the hospital.
"He said, 'Well, when do you think you want to go back on tour?' I took the oxygen out of my nose. I looked at him, and I said, 'in two [expletive] months!" she said. "I just said it. Sometimes you just have to say [expletive] and put it out in the universe. And it happens."
During the concert, Madonna also acknowledged one of her doctors, who was in the audience.
"I would call in every other day and ask [my doctor] why I didn't have any energy, when was my energy going to come back? When was I going to feel like myself again? When can I go on tour again?" she said. "All he would say is, 'Go outside in the sun' ... It was so hard for me to walk from my house to the backyard and sit in the sun. I know that sounds insane, but it was difficult."
Looking back, Madonna added that the experience forced her to slow down.
"It's a strange thing to finally not feel like I was in control, and that was my lesson: to let go," she said.
In the weeks leading up to her hospitalization in June, Madonna continued with tour rehearsals despite feeling "run down" and ignoring signs of illness, it later emerged.
A music insider revealed to People that the singer "ignored some symptoms of illness for quite a while because she thought they would go away. But she didn't want to take time away from rehearsals. She was run down and not feeling 100% for a while in anticipation of her tour."
Another insider claimed Madonna had been busy and was "not taking care of herself."