“Ashton went to his parents and said, ‘Take my heart.’ He said it truthfully. He really wanted to give it to his brother,” confirmed Dr. August then. “The person he loved most in the world, his brother, [was] going through that and he wasn’t able to… just push [Michael] a long. He had been helping his brother with cerebral palsy and some social problems at school, but now there is a problem he cannot solve.”
Luckily, Michael’s life was saved when a matching organ donor was found within 24 hours and he received a heart transplant. But his problems didn’t end there. Eventually, two years later, he developed a blood clot and had to undergo heart surgery. The whole experience helped Ashton feel grateful for his own health.
“I think when I’m standing on the balcony and I’m like, ‘I’m a match,’ that moment is probably exactly where the shift happened,” Ashton added. “Where I’m like, ‘How can I be so lucky? And my brother being born with cerebral palsy, then getting a heart transplant, then having this random blood clot… Who’s going through that? How can I be so lucky?’”
“There was a moment in all of this where I moved to New York and started to pick up some momentum with my career and Mike would come visit and stay and he would look at me and say, ‘Every time you feel sorry for me you make me less This is the only life I’ve ever known, so stop feeling sorry for the only one I have,” he continued. “That then led to a complete shift back to where I think we are today, which is that we are back on an equal footing. That’s it.”
Ashton first publicly revealed that Michael suffered from cerebral palsy in a 2003 interview, and while the latter was initially “angry” about it, he later viewed it as a “favor” that allowed him to live his real life. “[Ashton] did me the biggest favor he ever did by allowing me to be myself,” Michael said in 2021.
Watch the full interview with Ashton and Michael in the video above.