Billy Ray Cyrus is revealing his past near-fatal health scare.
“I got really sick and almost died,” Cyrus, 64, told People in a cover story published Wednesday, June 10. “As I was trying to stay alive, at times they sent me home from the hospital, and I’d be there with [my dog] Tommy Jack. My body was blowing up and there was a toxicity of some type of whatever. If it would have erupted, I would have died.”
He continued, “In the last moment, I had a prayer answered. There’s a prayer rock, and I found my knee. Part of the reason it’s so white is [because] I started getting on that rock every morning, every day, every sunset, every night. I [would] put my knee in there. I was like, ‘God, please. I need a miracle. I need a miracle.’”
Cyrus was soon set to have “one last surgery.”
“I got to the hospital, they go, ‘Mr. Cyrus, it’s gone, you’re healed,’” he recalled. “[I] had a miracle. Love, hope, music, joy, things that I’d really have forgotten exactly, maybe, what they felt like, and I go, ‘Oh!’ Even to dream again.”
Cyrus especially dreamed of making music again after a vocal paralysis diagnosis in 2024 left him physically unable to sing.
“I’ve been stricken with a disease and I have no voice. I can’t talk,” he said. “I start believing, once I had the first miracle, I said, “Cyrus, you can’t talk or sing now, but believe you can.’”
Cyrus soon began “leaning into” playing daughter Noah’s recently released song “Don’t Put It All On Me,” which his son Braison had written.
“I just love it so much,” he said. “I do credit that particular song with saving me. It’s part of it, for sure.”
Billy Ray shares Braison, 32, and Noah, 26, with ex-wife Tish Cyrus, as well as kids Brandi, 39, Trace, 37, and Miley, 33. (The “Achy Breaky Heart” singer is also the father of son Christopher, 34, whom he shares with ex Kristin Luckey.)
Billy Ray and Tish’s 2022 divorce spurned a divide among the Cyrus family.
“Sometimes change is scary, and I’ll keep doing the wrong thing for a long time because I’m scared of change,” Billy Ray told People of his divorce. “When I finally do get the courage up to commit in my mind and say, ‘I’m going to do this,’ then that’s the way it is. No looking back. I think that’s maybe sometimes good for everyone — to just let go.”
The Cyruses, however, have since mended fences.
“Life is a series of adjustments, and I think my family always knew that. We’ve all been through a lot, and we’ve seen a lot,” Billy Ray stated. “Whatever happened is in the rearview mirror. The past is over and done. The future is what we have, and we got to look forward.”
Billy Ray is now dating actress Elizabeth Hurley, while Tish found love with now-husband Dominic Purcell.
