Taylor Swift is opening up about her father’s recovery following his major health scare earlier this year.
The 35-year-old pop superstar recently revealed that her dad Scott Swift underwent an ‘intense’ quintuple bypass surgery over the summer — a procedure that came as a complete surprise to the family.
Back in August, Taylor Swift told her fiancé Travis Kelce and his brother Jason on their New Heights podcast that her father had an ‘interesting summer,’ explaining that doctors only discovered the issue after a resting stress test revealed ‘five hard blockages in his heart.’
Until then, she said, Scott’s yearly checkups had been spotless — ‘perfect EKG’ and ‘healthy physicals’ every time.
The health scare hit especially hard given the family’s history — Taylor’s mother, Andrea, was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 and later developed a brain tumor in 2020.
But now, there’s good news.
During Monday’s Morning Mash Up show, Taylor Swift gave a positive update: ‘By his own accord, he’s actually at 150 percent now.
‘So he’s definitely got too much energy. He’s doing amazing. I’m so happy. To contextualize this, my dad had a quintuple bypass surgery over the summer.’
She continued: ‘The biggest part of our summer was, as a family, just taking care of him and getting him back to his old self.
‘He had amazing medical care and help. The doctors and nurses that I’m going to be forever grateful for.
‘It recontextualizes to you what matters, honestly. It really does. Thank you for mentioning that because it reminds me how lucky I am that he pulled through.’
During August’s New Heights podcast, Taylor said doctors impressed the seriousness of the procedure on her father, telling him, ‘we’ve got to do this, like, tomorrow.’
According to Taylor, her dad’s doctors were surprised that he was even able to walk in without showing any obvious distress considering the degree to which the arteries in his heart were blocked.
As he prepared for the surgery on short notice, Scott told Taylor and her brother Austin that they didn’t need to rush to be with him because they were busy with their own lives, even though she planned to drop everything to support him.
‘He was being the brave dad, the strong dad, you know,’ Travis added.
Taylor recalled finding it ridiculous how much her father tried to downplay the seriousness of his condition.
‘He said something about, like, “When a cat is injured it curls up around a tree and heals itself.”
‘I was like, “Dad, cats don’t have quintuple bypass surgery. That’s wild. You’re just saying stuff now. That doesn’t mean anything to me.”‘
Taylor said she promised her father she wouldn’t make a fuss and fly to be with him, but it was all a fib, and he woke up surrounded by her, her brother, their mother Andrea and his best friend.
She recounted how Scott was loopy in his first 15 minutes awake and turned into a comedian, which impressed her, as she thought he was usually pretty funny even when he wasn’t drugged up from anesthesia.
The Eras Tour singer recalled how her family told him in shock that he had had a quintuple bypass, as they didn’t know how many arteries were blocked before he went into surgery.
Taylor did her best impression of her dad’s groggy post-surgery response with a croaking voice: ‘Well, you see, I come from a very competitive family.’
Scott was apparently so out of it that he tried to give the doctors and nurses around him some of Taylor’s guitar picks just after he woke up from surgery — a standard treat that he carries with him for fans — except that he wasn’t wearing pants and didn’t have any pockets in his surgical gown to hold the picks.
In the early days of his recovery, she realized that the parent–child dynamic had flipped, and now she was one of her father’s caregivers.
She smiled as she recalled how her parents used to scold her for staying up late to talk to her friend Abigail on the phone when she should have been sleeping, but now her brother was begging her to take her father’s phone because he had been FaceTiming his friends all night from his hospital bed instead of getting some much-needed sleep and rest
‘That’s, like, one of the main things you need,’ Travis reiterated.
Taylor recounted a comical scene in which she, Austin and their mother all refused to be the one to take his phone and possibly earn his ire.
The Folklore singer added that it was ‘surreal’ that her father used to build her cribs and play sets, but now it was her turn to build ‘his shower chair and his walker’ and his adjustable bed.
Because Scott couldn’t initially walk on his own, Taylor said she essentially moved in with her father for the summer and had to get him a harness to ‘walk’ him.
Travis then jumped in to say her father was ‘full of life’ and ‘appreciative that he caught it.’