Jason Derulo reflects on breaking his neck in near-death gym incident

“I was just like, ‘Holy s---, is this it? Is this how it all ends?’” the “Whatcha Say” singer said.

Jason Derulo reflected on a terrifying accident that broke his neck and almost cost him his life in an interview with Paris Hilton on her podcast I Am Paris posted Monday.

“S--- was crazy,” the “Whatcha Say” singer recalled about the 2013 incident. “I had this tour set up — it was the biggest tour of my life at that point.”

To prepare for the tour, the singer worked out with a trainer, who told him to repeatedly do back tucks — which, for the unfamiliar, are essentially backflips where the athlete jumps backward, lands on their hands, and then pushes off the ground with their arms to land back on their feet.

“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,” Derulo explained. “So I slipped during one of the back tucks and I landed on my head, breaking my C2 vertebrae.”

The singer said that he immediately thought he might die from the injury.

“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?’” he recalled. “And all the thoughts that you could imagine are going through my head at the time.”

Derulo then remembered that his mother was waiting for him in the car outside the gym, and he made a massive effort to prevent her from worrying.

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“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,” he said. “And 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.’”

Getting to the doctor was a challenge, he said: “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.”

Once he arrived at the hospital and received X-rays and other tests, the doctor arrived with the diagnosis.

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“Well, I have some good news and some bad news,” Derulo recalled the doctor saying. “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.”

This was going to ruin the tour, and Derulo felt terrible.

“I had to let all these people down,” he said. “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.”

During his recovery process, Derulo found a way to maintain productivity, however.

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“I created a routine for myself: I woke up in the morning, went to the gym and walked, I walked for about 45 minutes a day, and then I spent hours and hours in the studio,” he said. “Same time, same places every single day, and that’s when I wrote my most successful album, the Talk Dirty album, which had 'Talk Dirty,' 'Other Side,' 'Marry Me,' 'Wiggle' — all kinds of hits off that album. It’s because I created a routine, so it was like a common thing in my life when I’m able to really follow a routine, amazing things happen.”

Listen to the full conversation between Jason Derulo and Paris Hilton above.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.