When Ozzy Osbourne Was Diagnosed With AIDS

Black Sabbath icon Ozzy Osbourne is no stranger to being the hero of mind-blowing stories. From the time he bit the head of a living bat on stage to when he drank his own urine and snorted a line of ants, the list of memorable incidents is endless. As expected, the musician’s unexpected decisions were often fueled by substance addiction.

While most of these stories are amusing and sometimes dangerous, there was one time when the musician sabotaged himself without realizing it. Osbourne was diagnosed with AIDS, but believe it or not, the diagnosis turned out to be incorrect, and the results were wrong purely due to his substance abuse.

Ozzy Osbourne’s Substance Abuse Was Unbelievable

If there’s one thing as famous as Ozzy Osbourne’s music, it’s his substance addiction. The musician has abused alcohol and other drugs for most of his adult life. Therefore he has so many stories fueled by his addictions that his fans cannot decide which one is crazier than the other.

For instance, there was one time when Osbourne was so drunk that he performed a striptease on the table during a meeting with the head of CBS Europe in Germany. As if it wasn’t enough, the singer urinated in the executive’s wine and kissed him on the lips.

His drunk actions once got him banned from the city of San Antonio for a decade after he urinated on a cenotaph built in honor of those who died at the Battle of the Alamo in Texas while wearing his future wife Sharon’s dress. That same day, he had drunkenly fired his entire band and physically attacked his band members.

Fortunately for him and his inner circle, the Black Sabbath vocalist has managed to remain clean and sober for extended periods in recent years. He admitted to having been sober for about seven years after all those times of substance abuse mutated his entire genome to survive decades of drug misuse.

Ozzy Osbourne Was Falsely Diagnosed With AIDS

In the middle 1980s, Ozzy Osbourne decided to test for AIDS after sleeping with a groupie. The outcome was devastating for the rocker as the doctor told him that the results came back positive. Looking back at those times during an interview with Mirror, Osbourne stated that it was one of the worst days of his life.

When the former Black Sabbath frontman wanted to double-check the results, the second test, fortunately, came back negative. Apparently, the reason his test came positive in the first place was his immune system. All those years of alcohol and drug abuse severely damaged Osbourne’s immune system to a point where the results were at the borderline.

During the interview, Osbourne said:

“I went to the doctor and had an AIDS test, and he told me it was positive. That was one of the worst days of my life. It turned out that because I was drinking and using drugs so much, my immune system had dropped, so that it was a borderline result. When I went back to be tested again, it was negative.”

The Prince of Darkness dodged the bullet that time, but that doesn’t mean the substance abuse didn’t ruin many aspects of his life, from his relationship with his former band Black Sabbath to his familial life. Lucky for him, the musician recovered from his addictions and has been living a much healthier life ever since.