Judas Priest’s Richie Faulkner reveals he underwent open heart surgery for a second time

nme.com:

Judas Priest has revealed that he’s currently recovering from his second open heart surgery.Sharing the health update via social media on Tuesday (September 27), the guitarist disclosed that he’d undergone the surgery six weeks ago, following the European leg of Judas Priest’s current world tour. “Just before we toured Europe,” Faulkner recalled, “scans showed a hole in one of the connections between the synthetic graft and my own aorta.”Faulkner went on to explain the condition, writing that “the blood from the leak was forming an 8cm sack that was surrounding [his] heart.” The guitarist elaborated on the procedure, saying that doctors were able to “remove the sack and fix the leak.” Now, weeks later, Faulkner said he is “feeling well and strong,” and is “looking forward” to resuming the next jaunt of the metal band’s ongoing tour.A post shared by Richie Faulkner (@falconfaulkner)Faulkner accompanied the update with a video of the crowd at last year’s Louder Than Life music festival.

The festival was the site of Faulkner’s first heart complication, having suffered an aortic rupture onstage while performing alongside Judas Priest.

Faulkner reflected on the incident — which required emergency surgery in September 2021 — in the accompanying caption.“It’s crazy how one minute you’re listening to the crowd singing ‘War Pigs’…the[n] next it turns out that it was almost the last time I ever heard it… Unbeknownst to me there was stuff going on under the surface that was about to literally explode”, Faulkner wrote.