Ozzy making slow progress

Doctors were today continuing efforts to wean rocker Ozzy Osbourne off a ventilator following his quad bike crash.

Osbourne was last night said to be making slow but steady progress after the accident at his Buckinghamshire mansion on Monday.

Doctors at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough, UK, where he has been in intensive care since the drama, are in the process of weaning him off a ventilator but say it is still too early for him to breathe fully unaided.

Yesterday Osbourne’s wife Sharon said the former Black Sabbath frontman almost died after coming off the bike while riding over uneven ground.

In an interview with Britain's Daily Mirror, Sharon, 51, said her husband stopped breathing with his heart failing to beat for nearly two minutes.

She said the 55-year-old singer had been resuscitated by a security guard before he was taken to hospital for emergency surgery.

The hospital’s medical director Dr Dick Jack said Osbourne was “progressing well, but slowly”.

“With each day he becomes less dependent on the ventilator,” he said. “It is still too early to take him off entirely. Otherwise he is well, with no complications.”

Osbourne sustained multiple injuries in the accident including a cracked vertebra in his neck, eight broken ribs and a collarbone after the bike landed on top of him.

Doctors also had to restore the circulation in one arm after the broken collarbone put pressure on a blood vessel.

Mrs Osbourne told the newspaper: “He had stopped breathing for a minute and a half and there was no pulse.

“But thank God the security guard was there to revive him.

“He resuscitated him and got him breathing and his pulse going again. We are so, so grateful to

him.”

Sharon said doctors had still not been able to determine whether he had suffered any lasting damage.

“The doctors are hoping there hasn’t been any lasting damage but until Ozzy can actually come round and get off the ventilator and then they will know.”

Sharon also criticised comments by Pop Idol judge Simon Cowell, who suggested the accident would help Osbourne’s Christmas record sales. Cowell later apologised.