Bed rest can go pound sand: Ray J gave his all on stage on Friday night, it seems, with fan videos showing his eyes appearing to bleed as he worked the crowd.
The singer also doffed the top of his orange jumpsuit to reveal some sort of medical port or device inserted on the upper left side of his chest.
The “Love & Hip-Hop: Hollywood” star, who is singer-actor Brandy’s brother, was performing in Shreveport, La.
In the first clip, red liquid — which many assumed was blood — ran down one of the R&B singer’s cheeks like tears as he handed out long-stemmed red roses to people in the audience. Another clip showed him singing into a mic while climbing down from the stage after shedding the top part of his jumpsuit.
“Hey, y’all, we perfectly fine. Ain’t nobody sick. Look at me, I’m fine,” he says in a later clip, which takes place off stage. The 45-year-old appears to be annoyed, saying that people have been laughing at him because he’s sick.
“He loves the camera. He loves the attention,” Tommy Nard II of Nard Multimedia Group, who was behind the scenes that night, told Shreveport news station KTAL separately. “It’s all theatrical … I seen him literally put on the fake blood and go out there.”
A concertgoer told KTAL that it was “very concerning to see blood, what appeared to be blood, coming from his eyes.”
Ray J told TMZ in late January that he was under doctor’s orders to stay on bed rest and avoid drugs and alcohol. He said he was on eight medications related to his heart, which he said had been damaged because of his excessive drug and alcohol use.
“I thought I could handle all the alcohol, I could handle all the Adderall,” he said in a video livestream in late January.
Doctors told Ray J — real name William Ray Norwood Jr. — that he should prepare for the chance that he might need a pacemaker or defibrillator soon, the singer told the celebrity site. He expected to get an update when he went back in two weeks for a checkup.
Two weeks was up over the weekend.
Ray J told followers in a video posted Jan. 25 that he wanted to “thank everyone for praying for me.”
“I was in the hospital,” he said. “My heart is only beating like 25%, but as long as I stay focused and stay on the right path, then everything will be all right.” In a video, he said the right side of his heart was “like, black. It’s like done.”
Ray J said elsewhere that his heart was beating at 60%. The number likely refers to his heart’s ejection fraction, which measures the volume of blood coming out of the heart’s left ventricle or being drawn into the right ventricle when the heart beats. Right-sided heart failure is far less common, according to WebMD.
A representative for Ray J did not respond immediately Tuesday to The Times’ request for comment.
However, in an Instagram story posted Monday, Ray J put up this quote: “‘If you want to know who your real friends & family are, lose your job, get sick, or go through hard times. You’ll see clearly.”
