Jason Derulo thought he was going to meet his maker when he broke his neck.
The “Whatcha Say” crooner was gearing up for a mammoth tour in 2013 when things took a turn for the worse during a training session. He candidly shared on Paris Hilton’s “I Am Paris” podcast that trusting his hired personal trainer’s penchant for back tucks was “one of the worst ideas [anybody’s] ever had.”
“S*** was crazy. I had this tour set up — it was the biggest tour of my life at that point.
“He had me doing like 50 back tucks back to back to back, which is another one of the worst ideas somebody’s ever had. So I slipped during one of the back tucks and I landed on my head, breaking my C2 vertebrae,” Jason recounted.
Derulo immediately feared the worst.
“As soon as it happened, I heard a big crack, and I was just like, ‘Holy s***, is this it? Is this how it all ends?’ And all the thoughts that you could imagine are going through my head at the time.”
Despite the excruciating pain, the 34-year-old pop sensation gathered himself and kept calm to avoid alarming his mother, who was parked outside the gym.
“I did not wanna alarm her, so after five minutes of laying on the ground, I got myself together and walked to the car holding my neck.
“Then I’m like, ‘Mom, I think I hurt myself a little bit’ — like with that bright kind of voice — ‘I think I hurt myself a little bit inside, we should probably go to the hospital just to check it out.’
“Now every single bump [in the car] feels like hell on Earth. I’m just dying in that passenger seat, but I don’t wanna let her know that,” he recalled.
Jason underwent a battery of tests, including X-rays, where doctors delivered the astonishing news that he had dodged a bullet.
“Well, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you have a hangman’s break, which is the same break that happens when you get hung. And you’re still alive. This could’ve ended up way crazier: paralyzed or worse. That’s the good news, that you’re still here with us, and you can move all your limbs. The bad news is you’re gonna be out for seven months,” he recalled one medic telling him.
The “Talk Dirty” artist couldn’t shake the guilt of disappointing his fans by scrapping the tour.
“I had to let all these people down. I know how much this means to people, people save their money, their hard-earned money, and they wanna be part of this experience. All of a sudden all of that s*** was down the drain.”
Jason Derulo’s harrowing experience serves as a reminder that even the biggest stars are just a backflip away from calamity.
