I Almost Died

“When I was in the Bay Area for the holidays with my family,” says singer/songwriter Kenny Eng, “I broke my hip, two left ribs, my left scapula, my C6 vertebrae in my neck, and punctured a lung that collapsed. I was hiking up a steep hill when I slipped and rolled 30 feet, and then I fell off another 30-foot cliff at the bottom of the hill and fell into a chain-link fence.

“Luckily, I was with my friend Rob, who I had just played a show with in San Francisco, and he was able to call an ambulance to cart me off to the nearest hospital, Marin County General’s ER and ICU.” After being moved to Kaiser Hospital in Oakland to have surgery done on his broken left hip socket and fractured pelvis, he says, “I was in the hospital for two and a half weeks, and there I had three separate chest tubes stuck in me and contracted a staph infection and pneumonia.”

He also suffered damage to his kidney and liver. “I won’t be able to walk without assistance for about two months but, all things considered, it could have been much, much worse.”

Eng, who moved from San Francisco to San Diego in 2007, is recuperating at his apartment just off Adams Avenue, a neighborhood he both praises and criticizes. “It’s really easy to check out the street fairs and stuff like that without much effort. Other than the perpetual threat of some kind of bizarre crime, I’d have to say the inexplicably loud motorcycles driving down Adams Avenue at any hour of the day or night is pretty annoying. Also, the lack of parking and living close to a dumpster gets old really fast.”

Aside from curtailing any gig or recording activity for the immediate future, the timing of Eng’s painful surrender to gravity caused him one additional hardship. “I was supposed to go to Vegas with Rob Deez to see the Jay-Z and Kanye West Watch the Throne concert, and I imagine that would have been about the most ridiculous concert I’ve ever seen or experienced.

“But that, sadly, didn’t happen, because I almost died instead.”