Slipknot’s Corey Taylor recently spoke with Revolver about his broken neck, offering some insane revelations about the severity of his injury and how long he may have been walking around with a broken neck.

Right before Slipknot began their current tour with Marilyn Manson and Of Mice & Men, Corey was rushed into surgery after being seen by a specialist. After years of having trouble with losing strength on the right side of his body along with his sense of balance, Corey finally sought out medical attention.

“Seriously, the last two or three years have been weird for me, physically,” Taylor says. “But you get to a certain point where you think it's just because you're getting older. My doctor sent me to a specialist, and he was like, 'Oooh, yeah — we need to do surgery right now.' Me being me, I was like, 'Is there any way we can reschedule this for after the tour?' And he's like, 'No.' [Laughs] He said my spinal cord injury was 20 times worse that what he's seen with UFC fighters; he pulled up the MRI, and he goes, 'You see that? That's really, really bad! That shouldn't even be growing like that.' And I was like, 'Oh, s—t. You could have been paralyzed, dumbass!'"

Corey actually believes he sustained the initial injury back in 1999 after falling off a stage. "My foot slipped off a monitor, and I fell four or five feet off the stage and landed on my head,” Corey reveals. “I think that was what caused my two vertebrae to compact around the discs. Of course, being 25 and stupid, I didn't do anything about it. ‘I can move my head, I'm fine!' The funny thing was, I had staples in the top of my head at the time, from an earlier accident where I'd walked into a cherry picker. And after I fell off the stage, I went to the EMT to have them check on the staples, and not my neck. I was such a f—ing idiot, it's just not even funny! And then I just kind of forgot about it; but over the years, the headbanging and everything else I've done just exacerbated it to the point where the disc was crushed into my spinal cord."

Grab the September 2016 issue of Revolver for the full interview with Corey Taylor. For the remainder of Slipknot’s North American tour dates, click here.

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