Chris Bosh is here. He should not take that for granted, and neither should the rest of us.
The Hall of Famer told Sam Yip of HoopsHype this week that he suffered another pulmonary embolism in January and nearly died. He spent a week in the hospital. The blood clotting condition that ended his NBA career a decade ago is not something he beat. It is something he manages every single day.
“I had an episode in January,” Bosh said. “I almost dropped dead pretty much and came back to life. I’m not joking. I had another pulmonary embolism. It was in January. I was in the hospital for a week.”
He added, “I’m taking my medicine every day, taking care of myself every day, and watching it. So, I mean, no symptoms came either, you know, so. You got to deal with it for the rest of your life. I thought I was past it. I am not.”
Bosh is 42 years old now. He first mentioned this January episode back in February, when he shared that he had fainted and woken up covered in blood after feeling numbness in his leg. The full context of just how close he came to not making it out of that hospital week is what he wanted people to hear this week.
The medical story here is important because it is easy for fans to think Bosh’s blood clot problems ended when his NBA career did. He last played in 2015-16. That is a decade of retirement. Most retired athletes’ medical issues fade from public consciousness. Bosh’s condition is one of those things where you can be doing everything right and still get hit by an episode that puts you in a hospital bed.
His first documented pulmonary embolism came in February 2015. His second in February 2016. That second one effectively ended his career. He tried multiple times to come back, failed physicals, and eventually accepted that his body could not do the NBA anymore. That is a devastating outcome for someone who was still in his prime as a player. He handled it with grace and turned into one of the more thoughtful post-career voices in basketball.
Now, another decade later, he is dealing with a version of the same thing that almost killed him.
The good news is that he made it. The medication is working. He is not in crisis right now. He is doing the things you have to do when you have a chronic condition that can flare up without warning.
Bosh was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2021. He is a two-time NBA champion. He was an 11-time All-Star. His career was worth every accolade, even truncated. What he has done since he retired, in terms of raising awareness about blood clotting disorders and using his platform to talk openly about the challenges of managing a serious condition, is a bigger legacy than most of his contemporaries will have.
Every time Chris Bosh tells this story, he might save someone’s life. Someone reading it recognizes the symptoms. Someone gets to the emergency room in time.
Keep telling it, CB.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
