Ozzy Stricken With Worry For Sharon
Veteran rocker and MTV "reality" star Ozzy Osbourne says he is struggling to go on with his summer road show but feels like his "spirit's dead" since learning that his wife and manager, Sharon, has cancer.
"It's like someone has taken my heart away," Osbourne said in an interview airing this week on Fox News Channel's "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren" and on the Fox broadcast network's news magazine "The Pulse."
The tattooed British rocker said the huge success of "The Osbournes" show, which became MTV's biggest hit, followed by the diagnosis of his wife's colon cancer, made this year both the best and worst of his life. [CBS and MTV are both owned by Viacom.]
"When I heard my wife had colon cancer, it was like somebody pushing a button on an atomic bomb in my head," the 53-year-old singer said.
He also recalled feeling a sense of foreboding as he and his family were basking in the glow of their show's success.
"I remember saying to Sharon, 'This is too good right now, we're getting so much good stuff, nothing gets that high without coming down with a bang,'" he said.
Sharon Osbourne, 49, has been credited with reviving her husband's career after he was fired from heavy metal band Black Sabbath in 1979. In early July -- the month they celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary -- she underwent colon cancer surgery, and later revealed that two lymph nodes had since tested positive for malignant cells, indicating the cancer had spread.
Ozzy Osbourne subsequently announced he would take a three-week break from headlining this summer's "Ozzfest," an annual road show of hard rock acts organized by his wife, to be with her as she began chemotherapy treatments. But within days, she had sent her husband back on tour because he was "better off on the road."
"I want to be by my wife's side like any loving husband," Osbourne told Van Susteren. "It lasted a week because I was getting on Sharon's nerves ... to the point where I'm going, 'Are you OK, baby? Do you need anything?' And I'm crying, 'Oh, my baby,' and she said, 'Look, you're driving me nuts -- go back where you belong.'"
The Osbournes and two of their teenage children became overnight television stars thanks to MTV's reality hit -- heavily bleeped to delete expletives -- which chronicled the rambunctious clan's daily lives in Beverly Hills. MTV has signed the family for a second season, but the show's future was thrown into doubt by Sharon Osbourne's illness.