Catching up with some Country artists backstage over the weekend at Country Thunder Music Festival in Wisconsin, Scotty Kay of Chicago's US*99 sat down with Shane Profitt to chat about some pretty heavy stuff, including unexpected health scares and the frightening inspiration behind his new song, “Still Picks Up.”
LISTEN NOW: Shane Profitt on hiding his broken ribs and getting emergency surgery
In regards to those health scares, first there was the broken rib that Shane kept secret, and then a nearly ruptured gallbladder he had to have emergency surgery to remove.
“I was in New Jersey when it started, I started having some pain on my right side, and I didn’t really know what it was, and it went all the way to my back… It got so bad," he says, "I got home and I went to the doctor and they’re like ‘yeah you have a broken rib.’”
Aside from being unsure how he would have gotten such an injury having not fallen, Shane was also concerned about an upcoming 8-day run, “I was like, 'Alright I ain’t got time for this,' so I just kept popping ibuprofen, cause you can’t do anything for a broken rib anyway. So, I just wasn’t gonna tell my manager, I wasn’t gonna tell the label… I was trying to pull a tough guy thing, and I made it halfway through, and on the fourth night I got off stage and, I mean, it was just the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.”
After “balling” backstage, his unaware radio rep approached him to see what was going on. Confessing to the broken rib, Shane admitted the pain felt like the issue was more complex, noting his whole side was swollen.
She immediately sent Shane back home to Nashville to get checked into the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where after hours of tests and waiting around, he was eventually taken into emergency surgery to have his gallbladder removed.
“They said, 'originally your gallbladder is supposed to be the size of a large peanut,' and mine was the size of a nerf foam football," Shane says. "That surgeon the next morning… he came in there and told me… ‘Next time if you know something's not right, go to the doctor immediately.’" He said, "‘Honestly, I don’t know how that thing didn’t rupture, but if it had, like it should’ve, you’d a had about a 30% chance.'”
LISTEN NOW: Shane Profitt on how his new song "Still Picks Up" came from a scary moment with his dad
His 2023 single “Still Picks Up," Shane explains, "is actually kinda about my dad... We were on a hunting trip in Eastern Kentucky, I was still in the deer stand and I was watching my dad walk down this old logging road, but what I could see was a 50-yard stretch he was walking down. It took him like 10-15 minutes to walk that 50-yards.” Confused, Shane hopped out of his climbing stand, to walk over to his dad, “who still wasn’t at my tree yet,” to find the whole side of his face was not moving. "I knew immediately what that was," he says. A mile from their truck, up a big mountain, with the closest hospital over an hour away, his dad has suffered a massive stroke.
"Finally got him to the truck, we got him to a hospital, and I was sitting in the waiting room… thinking of some past fights that could have been avoided," Shane admits. "In the moment you don’t really know what’s gonna happen to who you care about,” he adds. “The thing that really really bothers, still to this day,” he says, was watching his father struggle with basic motor skills. “I was sitting in the waiting room, and that’s kinda how the song came about,” says Shane.
Check out the full interview clips with Scotty Kay above.
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