Legendary drummer Mikkey Dee, best known for his era-defining tenure with MOTÖRHEAD and his current role in SCORPIONS, has opened up about a life-threatening sepsis infection that nearly claimed his life in late 2024.
Speaking on SiriusXM on June 9, 2026, Dee recounted how a seemingly routine sprained foot in December 2024 spiraled catastrophically into full-body sepsis. Over the following weeks, he was hospitalized for five weeks at a facility in Gothenburg, Sweden, where medical teams performed three separate surgical procedures on his foot and lower leg.
"My whole body was shutting down on me," Dee said matter-of-factly — words that land with the weight of a man who has genuinely stared down death and kept going.
The culprit, doctors determined, was a yellow staphylococcus bacterium — typically a harmless skin surface microbe — that had entered his bloodstream and became fatally aggressive. The exact entry point remains unclear, though Dee speculated it may have been dormant in joint areas of his lower back before migrating and manifesting in his foot. "People die left and right of this shit," he observed, without dramatization.
By March 2025, Dee was declared bacteria-free — and in a remarkable show of the resilience that has defined his career, he performed in front of 100,000 people at Mexico City's Vive Latino festival that same month, with his son Marcus covering several drum passages during the set.
SCORPIONS subsequently rescheduled their Las Vegas residency to August 2025 to accommodate his recuperation.
Mikkey Dee joined MOTÖRHEAD in 1992, following the departure of drummer Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor, and remained the band's drummer until Lemmy Kilmister's death in December 2015. His work on albums like Bastards, Sacrifice, and the farewell Bad Magic stands as some of the most powerful drumming of the post-classic MOTÖRHEAD era.
His recovery is, by any measure, a metal triumph.