Sarah Silverman Is 'Insanely Lucky to Be Alive' After Freak Illness Left Her in ICU for 5 Days

Sarah Silverman is alive and well following a frightening medical scare.

The comedian took to Facebook on Wednesday, to thank her loved ones for standing by her while she was in the ICU at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after having contracted epiglottitis last week.

“I was in the ICU all of last week and I am insanely lucky to be alive,” her post began. “Don’t even know why I went to the doctor, it was just a sore throat. But I had a freak case of epiglottitis.”

Epiglottitis occurs when a piece of small cartilage that covers the windpipe swells and blocks air from getting into the lungs. It can cause respiratory failure, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Silverman, 45, went on to thank the medical team who worked to save her life as well as her loved ones.

She added that, “There’s something that happens when three people you’re so close to die within a year and then YOU almost die but don’t. (That was me. I’m the one that didn’t die.) It’s a strange dichotomy between, ‘Why me?’ and the other, ‘Why me?’ ”

“They couldn’t put me fully to sleep for the recovery process because my blood pressure’s too low,” she continued. “I was drugged just enough to not feel the pain and have no idea what was happening or where I was. They had to have my hands restrained to keep me from pulling out my breathing tube. My friend Stephanie said I kept writing ‘was I in an accident?’ ”

The actress went on to say that she when she came to, she couldn’t remember anything.

“When I woke up 5 days later I didn’t remember anything,” Silverman recalled. “I thanked everyone at the ICU for my life, went home, and then slowly as the opiates faded away, remembered the trauma of the surgery & spent the first two days home kind of free-falling from the meds / lack of meds and the paralyzing realization that nothing matters. Luckily that was followed by the motivating revelation that nothing matters.”

The actress went on to give a special thank you to her “real-life hero,” Michael Sheen.

“I’m so moved by my real-life hero, Michael, and amazing Sissies (blood & otherwise) & friends, who all coordinated so that there wasn’t a moment I was alone,” she wrote. “It makes me cry. Which hurts my throat. So stop. Anyway there are some funny stories too. I couldn’t speak for a while and I don’t remember a lot of my ‘lucid’ time, but Amy (the Zvi) told me I stopped a nurse – like it was an emergency – furiously wrote down a note and gave it to her. “When she looked at it, it just said, 'Do you live with your mother?’ next to a drawing of a penis.”

“Also, when I first woke up and the breathing tube came out, I still couldn’t talk and they gave me a board of letters to communicate,” she added. “My loved ones stood there, so curious what was going to be the first thing I had to say. They followed my finger, rapt, as I pointed from letter to letter until I finally spelled out, 'Did you see Hello My Name is Doris.’ ”