It is a little scary to think about, but life can change in the blink of an eye. Fitness queen Jillian Michaels recently experienced this firsthand.
Back in the spring of 2021, Jillian had a freak slip-and-fall accident that injured her spine. It was a scary moment followed by many other moments of uncertainty as she worked to figure out exactly what the issue was. She finally got answers, is almost fully recovered, and is telling her story for the first time.
Jillian opened up to People magazine about the yearlong ordeal. She wishes her injury had a cool story behind it, but it is pretty mundane. "I wish it was some gangster motorcycle story where I told you I was racing motorcycles or Lindsey Vonn-ing downhill at 60 miles an hour, but it wasn't. It makes it that much more disturbing, because in a way, it wasn't preventable,” she began.
Jillian was trying to communicate with her wife, DeShanna Marie Minuto, who was in the bathroom when the incident happened. Jillian says it was like slipping on a banana peel in a cartoon.
"I went running in and I smacked onto the edge of the bathtub with my back," she said.
With Jillian’s tough personality, she tried to just shake it off and continue life as normal. It became pretty clear after six weeks of intense lower back pain that this was not an injury to ignore. Things came to a head when she could not physically get out of the car one time when her family was trying to go out to dinner.
She went to the ER, but doctors there did not help much. They said they could see some sort of "nerve impingement" but quickly discharged her. She went home with pain meds but very little in the way of answers.
Things did not get better after that for Jillian. "I couldn't sleep. The pain at night was so bad. I truly thought to myself, 'The only thing I think would be worse than this would be burns.' It was so crazy. I couldn't walk, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't stand. I was having to crawl on the ground. I'm like, 'My life is over,'" she recalled.
Jillian went through several doctors and even used her celebrity before finding Professor Stuart McGill, a spine expert with a PhD in kinesiology. McGill was finally able to properly diagnose Jillian with an L3 vertebrae fracture. While it was great to have answers, her road to recovery was not easy.
Jillian was forced to slow down for a while, which was not easy for her. "What this guy basically has me doing is nothing. He literally is like, 'You're going to lay on your stomach. You're going to work on standing, you're going to walk as many steps as you can, you are going to lay back down and that's it.' That went on for a month,” she recalled.
With all the uncertainty surrounding her injury, Jillian chose not to share it with the public until she knew she would recover. "I'm posting old videos from 20 years ago on social media," Jillian recalled. "I'm not doing any press. I've disappeared off the grid. No one knows. Nobody has any idea as all of this is going on except my immediate circle. I'm like, 'I'm not telling this story until I know how this story ends.'"
Thankfully, her story has a happy ending. After Jillian rested her body for a time, McGill advised using the DB Method. This is a machine that assists the user in squatting and takes the pressure off the back, allowing it to heal. It worked so well for Jillian that she is now a spokesperson for it. She also received an epidural to help with her pain.
Jillian is almost back to normal these days but admits she still gets sore after jumping rope. She just has to listen to her body.
"I'm riding horses. I'm riding jet skis, I'm snowboarding. I'm just super, super careful,” she concludes.
