Gary Numan’s wife Gemma has been left partially paralyzed after undergoing spinal surgery, just months after the singer revealed his brother had died suddenly following a heart attack.
Gemma, 57, told fans in a post on Instagram that her left arm is now paralyzed following a multi-level discectomy, which is a procedure to remove damaged or herniated discs.
“No one can ever understand how s**t it is and not glamorous,” she added.
Gary and Gemma married in 1997 and have three daughters: Persia, Raven and Echo.
The couple live in Los Angeles but Gemma had her surgery in the UK, and said she has been unable to travel back to the States since September last year.
“Gutted!” she wrote. “I miss my animals so much, it makes me feel sick! Gary has looked after me here in the UK the whole time.”
The mum-of-three also thanked her loved ones for their help, writing: “It couldn’t have happened without you!”
Gemma added that the operation was her third since August last year, telling her Instagram followers that she still has another to come.
It comes after 67-year-old Gary announced the sudden death of his younger brother, John, in November. Fans had been concerned for Numan after he broke down in tears midway through a Birmingham performance of his song “Please Push No More”, telling the audience that he had received “the worst news ever”.
In an emotional post on social media, Gary later told fans his brother died just moments after he said goodbye to him following a show in Leeds.
“He had spent the evening with me at my Telekon show, catching up, swapping stories, telling me about his newly found love of reading,” he wrote.
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“I hugged him at the door of our tour bus, I think it was about 12:20am, asked him how far he had to walk to get to his car (I always worried about him walking the streets at night), it was not far apparently, we said goodbye and I watched him walk away.
“Sadly he never made it to his car, betrayed by his own heart. It will haunt me forever that we may have driven off not knowing that he was lying in a rainy street just yards away. Luckily a kind person saw him and called an ambulance, but it was too late.”
