Popular YouTuber Brandon Buckingham has broken his silence after being rushed to the hospital, providing his followers with a concerning health update after contracting an extremely rare disease.
Buckingham is known for his rather wild videos where he shares some of the most dangerous areas of America with his followers, including uploads that reveal the infamous lives of gang members and criminals.
This has left him in some rather precarious situations, including one where he almost died after being shot at in a car, and this appears to have been the start of what would eventually turn into a health crisis for the YouTuber.
In his latest video, titled 'I Almost Died...', Buckingham reveals that he began to experience rather extreme anxiety, stress, and insomnia after this shooting, and that only got worse after going to an EDM festival, continuing to spiral after that.
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He was regularly vomiting every single day, describing his physical and mental health as 'terrible', and nothing could seemingly solve the issue no matter what he tried.
This came to a head in November last year, when he was rushed to the hospital after waking up with a number of horrific symptoms. "I woke up not knowing where I was, completely deaf, my feet were swollen, and I was in severe pain," the YouTuber explained in a GoFundMe post.
Doctors diagnosed him with a long list of health problems including: "Sepsis with acute renal failure, acute kidney injury, pneumonia of both lungs, acute liver failure, with my blood test showing my AST [...] with mine coming in at a ridiculously high 2,809 — 58 times higher than the highest healthy range."
This was accompanied by a number of other life-threatening conditions, and they even believed that he might have had tuberculosis, which thankfully isn't the case anymore.
"In the ICU, my heart is failing, my lungs are failing, my liver and kidneys are failing," Buckingham wrote on X while he was in hospital. "Things are not looking good my friends. I love you guys."
While he has since thankfully left the hospital and is showing signs of progress, he's still far from a full recovery and major organs like his lungs and heart are in a bad state.
"In not so good news, my lungs have permanent damage to them and according to my most recent echo cardiogram, I am still in heart failure, leaving me feeling pretty bad most days," Buckingham explained.
Doctors have also informed him that he'll need to take three different heart medications for the rest of his life, and those problems will likely persist indefinitely too.
On top of this, his time in hospital also saddled him with around $450,000 of medical debt, with the largest bill being $362,000, although he has managed to raise over $322,000 through the aforementioned GoFundMe campaign so far from a $75,000 target.
Buckingham recalls asking for death at times across the last few months, yet is now thankful that he's managed to survive through what's hopefully the worst of it, and has pledged to live life to its fullest.
"All I wanted was a second chance at life, and that second chance is why I feel like I am truly blessed," he proclaimed, relating his own experience to that of his brother who tragically passed away in 2019 after suffering a heart attack.
