power of stoicism<\/a>, and what it\u2019s like to hear a doctor say you may not make it<\/p>\nGQ: With all your health issues, is there one moment over the last\u2014I guess, 12 years\u2014that really stands out as the watershed, holy shit moment for you?<\/p>\n
Deryck Whibley: I mean, there\u2019s really only really been one health issue for me, which was liver failure due to excessive drinking.<\/p>\n
So when your body shut down, that was the moment that you remember the most?<\/p>\n
Oh, absolutely, but it was the greatest day of my life. There\u2019s so much emotion wrapped around it that I can remember it so clearly. It does feel like yesterday, even though it was about 12 years ago, April 2014. Obviously, that was the catalyst of everything changing in my life, but for the better. At the time, it felt like the most difficult thing. It was the most difficult thing I\u2019d ever been through. It was painful, it was awful. It was draining in every possible way. I mean, for one, I almost died. My organs shut down. So there was that whole thing. Physically, I was dying. They managed to keep me alive, and coming out of that was a long journey.<\/p>\n
Just the physical side of it, like I couldn\u2019t walk for a long time because of the severe drinking and neuropathy. It caused nerve damage in my feet. I couldn’t walk for a year, at least without a lot of pain, and for the first few months, I couldn\u2019t walk at all. There was a lot of muscle atrophy on top of the neuropathy. I overcome that, but my motor skills were completely fucked. I couldn’t form real sentences. I could only say one syllable at a time for a long time. Not only that, the one solace I thought that I would have was that I could pick up a guitar. That\u2019s my one thing that I could always go to. I picked up a guitar and I couldn\u2019t play it. I was looking at my fingers like, my brain knew what it wanted them to do, but I couldn\u2019t tell them what to do.<\/p>\n
Everything was very difficult in that way. But then on the mental side of it, I mean, there was so much shame, and guilt, and blame, and embarrassment, and confusion, and fear. I don\u2019t think there was one good thing going on in my life at the time. There was nothing really positive other than I survived. That was enough, to be like, \u201cOkay, I\u2019ve survived.\u201d At least I\u2019ve got one thing to hold onto. I didn\u2019t die. So now it\u2019s about getting better. When I was in the hospital, the doctors were telling me, \u201cLook, it’s going to be 50-50, we may not be able to save you here.\u201d They were just straight up with me like, \u201cWe’re going to do our best.\u201d There were a few times that things were going south and I would end up back in the ICU because my organs started failing. After I\u2019d been there for a couple weeks thinking I\u2019m on the mend, all of a sudden I would start vomiting blood because my organs were shutting down. It happened a couple times. So they were like, \u201cYou may not make it out of here.\u201d But I made that vow that if I ever got out of there, that I was going to completely turn my life around, and I\u2019ve never looked back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Deryck Whibley nearly drank himself to death. In 2014, the frontman of legendary pop punk band Sum 41…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[93,426,103,61,60,278,446,36941,10698],"class_list":["post-502831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-entertainment","tag-food","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music","tag-nutrition","tag-real-life-diet","tag-working-out"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}