Of Mice & Men singer Austin Carlile‘s health struggles this year derailed the band’s live activities for the latter half of 2015. In a new interview with Metal Hammer, Carlile has revealed exactly what set him back and forced him into surgery. Of that he offered:
“Between the Linkin Park tour and our headlining tour in the States was when I started having problems with my rib and my head. In the first few days of our headlining tour, I tore my dural sac, which is a sac membrane in your skull that holds all the fluid in your brain. People would see me grabbing my head and not understand why. That was why. I didn’t tell anybody about it during the tour, other than my band and the tour manager. The tour was too important to us.”
Carlile—who suffers from the connective tissue disorder Marfan Syndrome—later dislocated a rib on that same tour, offering
“For the whole tour, any time I would inhale, my rib would pop out of my muscle and re-tear it – and I’d have to pop it back in. The whole tour I was going from spinal epidural to spinal epidural just so I could tour, on top of the dural sac tear, so the tour was rough! I couldn’t even masturbate or have sex with my girlfriend for months!”
As for the eventual surgeries, Carlile stated:
“They saw that my body was just done and we cancelled the last two dates. Four days later, I was at Stanford University under anaesthesia and, in the same eight-hour surgery, I got four inches of my rib and my cartilage removed through my stomach, and I had the tear in my dural sac repaired.”
Currently the band are working on their new album and Carlile continues to receive physical therapy & more to get his body back into fighting shape. He said of the band’s future plans:
“My body’s not ready to be back on the road, which is fine, because guess what I’m doing right now? Physical therapy and writing music, and this next album… I thought I had ammo for the last one, but on this one it’s tenfold! It’s awesome to have something like Of Mice & Men to pour these experiences into and to share my story with people that are dealing with that same stuff.”
