Amitabh Bachchan was stirring nostalgia with one of his recent blog posts wherein he opened up about his condition post the near-fatal accident on the sets of Coolie in 1982.
Recalling the incident, Big B wrote, “The skin and face ages .. the scars of surgical relevance show up deeper .. that line on the nostril .. a reminder of the days spent in the ICU at Breach Candy Hospital after the Coolie accident .. the pipes, well some of the many that were then inserted for survival , would be pulled out by me in my stupor and semi coma condition .. it irritated me .. so they found a permanent solution .. they stitched it to my nostril , so I could not pull it out .. and it, the scar has remained .. that scar below on the neck...the tracheostomy .. in those days the neck was cut and the life saving apparatus was inserted there .. the machine connected to it breathed for you .. you lost your voice till it was there .. if and when I was in a condition to say something, I had to either gesture or seek a paper to just about be able to write a few shaky scratchy words."
Amitabh also mentioned that he would write notes to his wife and actor Jaya Bachchan in ‘broken Bengali’, asking her for water and other things. “Mostly surreptitiously to Jaya in broken Bengali, asking her to give me a sip of water - forbidden by the doctors .. so the nurses and doctors would not understand .. it never worked .. they would find out,” he wrote.
During the filming of a fight scene in Coolie, also featuring Puneet Issar at the Bangalore University campus, Amitabh met with a severe accident. The actor was rushed to a Mumbai hospital and had to undergo multiple surgeries. The actor had once written on his blog about how he was declared clinically dead for a few minutes before being put on the ventilator.
