Famous Tracheotomies - Okkervil River

When I had my tracheotomy

I was blue and had stopped breathing

There was something wrong with me

Doctors cut through the cartilage and skin

At the bottom of my throat

And then they snaked that trach tube in

And I was one and a half

I was my parents only kid

And they had lost two before that

And growing up, I always knew how close I’d come

Well, that must have been scary, Mom

Gary Coleman, he was «Arnold» on TV

Well, I grew up watching him and Conrad Bain and Kimberly

It turns out that he had a trach scar too

Where they cut into his throat

And then they threaded that tube through

But that was much later on

In the year that he turned forty when his fanbase was all gone

And his health was so touch-and-go

His girlfriend proposed

But they broke up on a TV show

Mary Wells, she was known as Motown’s Queen

But laryngeal cancer left her unable to sing

They tried radiation, multiple surgeries

But she didn’t have insurance and lost almost everything

Poor thing

But Diana Ross helped with her bills

Aretha Franklin tried her very best to help out Mary Wells

And Dionne Warwick did all she could do

And Mary Wells, she pulled through

For one more year or two

Dylan Thomas looked completely pale and weak

On a trip to New York City to promote his poety

Three straight days of drinking out in Greenwich and Chelsea

He was taken to the hospital, turned blue and not breathing

And Caitlin Thomas said

When she walked into St Vincent’s

«Is the bloody man dead yet?»

And later that day she got so drunk she was restrained

And her husband slipped away

Ray Davies had a tracheotomy

He was at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, aged thirteen

And during his long recovery

Nurses put him in a wheelchair

And they’d wheel him out onto a balcony (on a balcony)

And down that evening sun did sink

Painting London and the river and that freaked-out future Kink

Waterloo lit up for one sick kid

And, at 23, he recorded a song about it