Celebrity pastor T.D. Jakes has disclosed that the life-threatening medical emergency he suffered last year was a heart attack.
He shared this in an exclusive interview on TODAY.
“I didn’t really realize what was happening to me onstage until I got to the hospital in an ambulance and fussing that it happened onstage, by the way, because I didn’t want it to happen, and the doctor leaned over my ear and said, ‘You had a massive heart attack,'” Jakes told Craig Melvin on TODAY on March 26.
Jakes, 67, was preaching on Nov. 23, 2024, at The Potter’s House when he experienced a medical emergency.
Video of the moment shows Jakes pausing onstage and shaking after lowering the microphone. Church officials then rush the stage to help him before the video cuts out.
“The reason I didn’t realize it was because I had none of the symptoms that they say,” Jakes told Craig about the heart attack. “No numbness, no sharp pain, no anything. I just kind of drifted off to sleep. I didn’t know what it was, but I almost died.
“(The doctor) said five minutes later, I’d have been dead on arrival,” he continued. “The right side of my heart had completely stopped getting blood at all.”
Jakes had been standing onstage and preaching before sitting down in a chair and experiencing the heart attack.
“As long as I was up preaching, I felt fine,” he said. “But when I sat down, the adrenaline dropped, and it exposed the fact that I was preaching with half of my heart closed through a clot. And they had to go get it.”
The pastor also shared what he saw in that moment.
“It’s hard for me to look at that video,” he said. “They had to claw the microphone out of my hand. But in my mind, I was in a quiet, peaceful, serene, white-enveloped, cloud-enveloped space.
“I was on my way out,” he continued. “Afterwards in retrospect, it was such a privilege to stand on the other side, to get a little glimpse of what it might be like, or at least what it was like in that moment for me. I think it was absolutely amazing.”
He also gave thanks for the prayers he received from his congregation and people around the world.
“While they were praying, the surgeons were operating while I was awake,” he said. “They never put me to sleep. Technology is amazing.”
