| When I had my tracheotomy
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| I was blue and had stopped breathing
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| There was something wrong with me
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| Doctors cut through the cartilage and skin
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| At the bottom of my throat
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| And then they snaked that trach tube in
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| And I was one and a half
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| I was my parents only kid
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| And they had lost two before that
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| And growing up, I always knew how close I’d come
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| Well, that must have been scary, Mom
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| Gary Coleman, he was «Arnold» on TV
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| Well, I grew up watching him and Conrad Bain and Kimberly
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| It turns out that he had a trach scar too
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| Where they cut into his throat
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| And then they threaded that tube through
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| But that was much later on
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| In the year that he turned forty when his fanbase was all gone
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| And his health was so touch-and-go
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| His girlfriend proposed
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| But they broke up on a TV show
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| Mary Wells, she was known as Motown’s Queen
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| But laryngeal cancer left her unable to sing
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| They tried radiation, multiple surgeries
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| But she didn’t have insurance and lost almost everything
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| Poor thing
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| But Diana Ross helped with her bills
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| Aretha Franklin tried her very best to help out Mary Wells
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| And Dionne Warwick did all she could do
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| And Mary Wells, she pulled through
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| For one more year or two
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| Dylan Thomas looked completely pale and weak
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| On a trip to New York City to promote his poety
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| Three straight days of drinking out in Greenwich and Chelsea
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| He was taken to the hospital, turned blue and not breathing
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| And Caitlin Thomas said
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| When she walked into St Vincent’s
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| «Is the bloody man dead yet?»
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| And later that day she got so drunk she was restrained
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| And her husband slipped away
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| Ray Davies had a tracheotomy
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| He was at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, aged thirteen
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| And during his long recovery
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| Nurses put him in a wheelchair
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| And they’d wheel him out onto a balcony (on a balcony)
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| And down that evening sun did sink
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| Painting London and the river and that freaked-out future Kink
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| Waterloo lit up for one sick kid
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| And, at 23, he recorded a song about it |