Corey Taylor could have been left paralysed after breaking his neck.
Corey Taylor
The Slipknot frontman - who recently cancelled a string of tour dates because of his injury - admitted he was a "f***ing idiot" for ignoring the symptoms he had been experiencing after attributing his reduced movement to getting older and when he finally had medical treatment, he was stunned to learn how bad his condition was.
He told Revolver magazine: "I was losing strength on my right side. My balance was screwed. The last two or three years have been weird for me, physically. But you get to a certain point where you think it's just because you're getting older.
"My doctor sent me to a specialist, and he was like, 'We need to do surgery right now.' Me being me, I was like, 'Is there any way we can reschedule this for after the tour?' He's like, 'No.'
"He said my spinal cord injury was 20 times worse than what he's seen with UFC fighters. He pulled up the MRI and goes, 'You see that? That's really, really bad - that shouldn't even be growing like that.
"And I was like, 'Oh, s**t. You could have been paralysed, dumbass!' "
The 'Wait and Bleed' hitmaker believes the problem may have begun as far back as 1999, when he fell off stage and landed on his head.
He explained: "My foot slipped off a monitor, and I fell four or five feet off the stage and landed on my head. I think that was what caused my two vertebrae to compact around the discs. Of course, being 25 and stupid, I didn't do anything about it. 'I can move my head, I'm fine!'
"The funny thing was, I had staples in the top of my head at the time, from an earlier accident where I'd walked into a cherry picker. And after I fell off the stage, I went to the EMT to have them check on the staples, and not my neck. I was such a fucking idiot, it's just not even funny! And then I just kind of forgot about it; but over the years, the headbanging and everything else I've done just exacerbated it to the point where the disc was crushed into my spinal cord."
And though Corey has been told to avoid jumping and headbanging on stage by his doctors, he is enjoying the "challenge" of performing in a different way.
He told The Pulse Of Radio: "I've had to kind of reassess what I do live, you know.
"But at the same time, the positive is that I love the challenge of it. Maybe I've relied on those things for too long, let's see if I can get through a show or a tour without having to go to these kind of mainstays. And the shows have been great. I've been damn near on pitch-wise, my stamina's a lot better -- it's like I'm really kind of filling in all these weird blanks."
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