Famous Tracheotomies

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