In her first-ever appearance on the Kelces' New Heights podcast that aired Wednesday, the superstar shared details on her dad’s previously undetected condition.
The tracklist for Taylor Swift’s new album wasn’t the only surprising detail discussed during the singer’s debut on the New Heights podcast Wednesday. During the two-hour-long episode, co-hosts Travis Kelce, Swift’s boyfriend, and his brother Jason asked her about how she made it through the grueling schedule of The Eras Tour (hint: lots of baths), reclaiming her masters this year, and when her just-announced album, The Life of a Showgirl, is coming out (it’s October 3).
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But it was a more personal moment during the conversation that resulted in Swift opening up about a recent health scare concerning her 73-year-old dad. After Jason Kelce inquired how her father, Scott, was doing, Swift said he’s doing “incredibly well” before sharing more: “My dad had an interesting summer. He actually had a quintuple bypass surgery and that’s a really intense surgery. So, it all happened really quick … I know he would want me to say this because he really learned a lot through this process.”
Swift went on to say her dad had always had perfect EKG results during his annual physicals, but it was a resting stress test that revealed five blockages in his heart. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, a resting stress test—also known as resting myocardial perfusion scan or nuclear stress test—is an imaging test used to determine how well the heart muscle is pumping, and how the blood is flowing through that heart muscle. A doctor may order the test after a heart attack, when someone’s experienced either new or continuing chest pain, or for other reasons, including diagnostic.
“They’re like, ‘We got to do this like, tomorrow … we don’t know how you walked in here, dude,’” Swift said when recounting the events leading up to her dad’s surgery. Heart bypass surgeries have the goal of restoring blood flow within the heart, according to the Cleveland Clinic, as “Artery blockages can cut off blood flow, causing heart attacks or heart attack-like symptoms.”
Swift later joked that her dad wasn’t exactly the best at resting post-surgery and seemed to find comfort in connecting with his friends: “It’s like we’ve [Swift, her brother Austin, and mom Andrea] got to take our teenage son’s phone away from him ’cause he’s FaceTiming all night. He came out of surgery, tried to give guitar picks to all the nurses and doctors, but he wasn’t wearing pants, didn’t have pockets, hospital gown…”
Swift has previously shared that both of her parents have faced cancer (and she wrote the song “Soon You’ll Get Better” about her mom’s cancer diagnosis). In the New Heights episode, Swift revealed that her mom recently underwent a knee procedure and is “not quite at scampering around yet, but she’s doing great.”
“This was just, like, the summer of my parental upgrades,” said Swift. “Like, we’re just upgrading the parents, making sure that they live to be at least 186 years old because they’re two of my best friends and I just adore them.”
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