Conway The Machine recently opened up about his 2012 shooting, which left him with Bell’s Palsy and the right side of his face paralyzed.
The Buffalo rapper sat down for an interview with Ebro In The Morning to speak on his forthcoming album Won’t He Do It, which drops Friday, and in turn discussed the project’s teaser trailer that documents his life-changing moment after getting shot in the neck and face back in 2012.
“I feel like that shit gotta be talked about,” Conway said at the four-minute mark above. “It ain’t cause it’s like, ‘alright it’s the cool thing...oh I’ve been shot...oh I’ve been through this,’ it’s like really the premise is to show people to never give up. I was the guy with all the obstacles that you could think of. I was the older guy in the room, in the studio, I was shot, I had half my face paralyzed. I’m from Buffalo, you know stuff like that. And to me those was just obstacles and imagine if we could just break through those walls what we could be. I just wanna inspire people with my story.”
He continued, “When it initially happened I was only in [the hospital] for a couple weeks and then I got out. But see what I’m saying in the hood for somebody that got shot in the head and the neck that’s fast. But you know how it is when your insurance is not that good and you go to the hood hospitals and stuff. They need them beds and them rooms so they’re just trying to get you up out of there, and they actually released me kinda too early and I had to go back for another period of time...I had one surgery and that was just to get the bullet out of my neck.”
Conway concluded that he was “lucky” because of where the bullets hit him, but admitted that the nerve damage to his face was “nothing to sneeze at.”
“That’s all I had was severe nerve damage on my right side,” he said. “Really in all my arms and legs. I had no feeling, I couldn’t lift this can, I couldn’t walk to the bathroom. So even outside the hospital, I was dealing with that for a year and a half.”
This isn’t the first time the former Griselda member has spoken about his experience getting shot. In an interview with The Athletic back in 2020, Conway also spoke about the mental health issues that came from the traumatic experience.
“I don’t feel like I’m disfigured or none of that, but when you gotta look at yourself in the mirror and you know that you don’t look the same or your kids gotta see you don’t look the same and your momma gotta see you like that, it definitely takes a toll and it’s like a war in your mind,” he admitted. “In my mind it was like, ‘Man, I don’t even want people to see me like this.’”
“The mental part of it was harder than the physical. I had to re-calibrate. I had to strengthen my mind before I could strengthen my body. I lost it for a minute. Mentally I just wasn’t in a good space.”
Check out the full interview up top.
