Billy Porter has revealed he was “dead for three days” after a terrifying sepsis battle that forced him off Broadway.
The Emmy-winning actor and singer, 55, was starring in “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” when the life-threatening infection struck. Doctors later discovered a kidney stone trapped in his urethra had triggered the crisis, requiring emergency surgery to save his life.
“When they got in there, there was so much puss and bile and infection behind the stone,” Porter explained on the Outlaws podcast. “It bubbled up, and I went uroseptic in minutes.”
Porter’s harrowing account comes as public attention turns to sepsis awareness, with medical experts emphasizing the condition’s unpredictable nature. According to Mayo Clinic, sepsis occurs when the body responds improperly to an infection, with symptoms ranging from altered mental status and rapid breathing to unexplained sweating and shivering.
Whoopi Goldberg faced her own brush with mortality in 2019 when pneumonia led to sepsis. The talk show host, 69, addressed her recovery on The View that February, telling viewers: “I am here. I am up and moving around. Not as fast as I’d like to be, but I am OK. I’m not dead.”
“I came very, very close to leaving the Earth,” Goldberg continued. “Good news: I didn’t.”
Perez Hilton spent 21 days hospitalized earlier this year after dismissing his initial symptoms. The blogger and media personality recalled in a YouTube video how stomach pain escalated overnight into a medical emergency.
“People die of sepsis,” Hilton stated. “The day before I was hospitalized, I was in so much stomach pain. I was like, ‘This is weird, but it will go away.’ The next morning, I couldn’t walk. I had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital.”
Hilton underwent laparoscopic surgery before beginning what he described as a grueling recovery. He added: “It was such a slow process. I mean, two weeks of just sickness and then another week of getting better before I was released.”
“The last week was hell, because I had already been in the hospital two weeks by then,” Hilton continued. “I was like, ‘I just want to go home. I just want to be with my babies.'”
Reality television personality Vicki Gunvalson received a grim prognosis during her own sepsis ordeal, with doctors giving her only a 10 to 20 percent chance of survival after initially misdiagnosing her condition as a sinus infection. Her boyfriend, Michael Smith, found her unconscious in the bath and later detailed the experience on My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast.
“It was actually sepsis, but it was pneumonia,” Smith explained. “And what happened — and I’m no doctor, but when they explained it — is that when your body is fighting that big of an infection and that dangerous of an infection, your whole body attacks it, which affects the brain and everything else in your body because your body sends everything it has to fight it.”
Swedish musician Dee, 61, developed sepsis in January 2025 after what began as a sprained foot. Speaking to newspaper Aftonbladet, he described how the injury rapidly deteriorated: “The ankle swelled up like hell, then it took on a weird shape and appearance and looked like an overcooked ham.”
“I became very ill so I had to go by ambulance to Sahlgrenska and there they found that I had sky-high values, so I became priority one there,” Dee added. “It was surgery right away, the first of three. They cut away what was dead and infected and badly infested.”
Actress and singer Jamie-Lynn Sigler, 43, disclosed her previously private sepsis battle on the MeSsy podcast, tracing it to a June 2024 surgical complication. The health scare came just weeks after she had returned from an ashram in India feeling spiritually renewed.
“A little less than a year ago now is when I went to India and I lived in this ashram and I felt so awakened and connected and peaceful,” Sigler shared. “And when I came home, two weeks later, I had a very bad reaction to a surgery and got sepsis and was in the hospital and almost died. I never told anybody this.”
Medical professionals stress that sepsis demands rapid intervention, as the condition can advance to septic shock — a catastrophic drop in blood pressure that damages vital organs including the lungs, kidneys and liver.