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Freddie Mercury stopped taking the drugs that were keeping him alive two weeks before he passed away.
The Queen frontman passed away from complications from AIDS in November 1991 aged 45 and his former personal assistant, Peter Freestone has told how he and friend Joe Fanelli cared for the ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ singer in his final days as he “slowly let go”.
He said: “The only thing he would take would be painkillers, he slowly let go.
“Joe called me at about 5.30am and Freddie had basically gone into a coma and we made Freddie sort of comfortable. You could see Freddie had moved a bit and then as we were changing his T-shirt we just looked and saw his chest had stopped moving.”
And Anita Dobson, who is married to Queen guitarist Brian May, felt Freddie was preparing to die six months before he eventually passed away.
She said: “I remember he said ‘When I can’t sing anymore darling, then I will die. I will drop dead’.”
Before his diagnosis, Freddie had been worried about a mark on his hand but refused to take a call from his doctor with biopsy results.
Speaking in upcoming documentary ‘Freddie Mercury: The Final Act’, Peter said: “We had all the excuses how he was in the bath, he was out, he was somewhere. He just did not want to talk to the doctor. So I have a very good idea he knew this was Kaposi sarcoma, which was one of the first indications of AIDS.”
After being diagnosed with HIV in 1987, Freddie vowed to keep making music for as long as he could but was determined not to make his condition public.
Brian recalled: “The first time we really knew was when we got together in Montreux.
“Freddie just sat down and said ‘OK, you guys probably know what is going on with me. You know what I am dealing with. I don’t want to talk about it.
“I don’t want to take any action apart from carrying on the way we are. I want to carry on making music for as long as f**king can.
“We will not dwell on it and we will go on’. We all went ‘OK’ and that was it. There was a discussion about what we would say if we were questioned and we all agreed to deny it to protect Freddie.
“We felt quite comfortable about that. When we were in the studio and the studio doors were closed we had fun. For Queen as a family it was fantastic. We were never closer. But then Freddie was suffering.”
