Adam DeVine is still dealing with the physical impacts of a childhood accident, but his prognosis seems much better than when doctors told the Righteous Gemstones actor that he was dying.
In a new interview on the podcast In Depth With Graham Bensinger, DeVine said he had been experiencing spasms linked to his injuries from when he was hit by a cement truck while riding his bike at age 11.
“They don’t really know [what’s wrong], and I was having spasms all over, and I still kind of do. They don’t really know,” he said. “For a while, they told me I was dying. Literally, within this last year, they told me that.”
DeVine said doctors originally diagnosed him with stiff person syndrome, which is a rare, chronic condition that causes muscle stiffness and muscle spasms, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
So DeVine went to see an expert in the field, the person who coined the name of the condition. “I went and saw him, and he’s like, ‘You don’t have it. You do not have it,’” he said. “He’s like, ‘This is from your accident, from when you were a child. The spasms are a little unexplainable, but it could just be you got so tight that your body doesn’t know what to do with it. So, you’re misfiring a little bit.’”
DeVine thinks his intense pandemic-era workouts exacerbated his symptoms. “I think I just got so tight and so tightly wound, and my body is all has all these things that are a little wonky and a little wrong with it, that I just sort of snapped, and I think I’m still dealing with it,” he explained. “It’s been three years now. It hurts to sit for too long, it hurts to stand for too long, it hurts to walk for too long. I have to foam roll two or three times a day. I have to do stretches two or three times a day.”
The Pitch Perfect alum revealed he underwent multiple hip surgeries, but it’s the stem cell treatment in Colombia that seems to be doing him the most good. “I’m the best I’ve been now for the past three years,” he said. “Like, right now is the best I’ve been.”
DeVine is also adjusting his dreams of being a “comedy action star,” he said. “Now I’m like, ‘I’m going to be the comedy guy in the action movie with an action star, and he does all the action stuff.’ But I really wanted to be the guy that does it all, ’cause I like doing stunts. I think it’s cool. But now I’m sort of trying to walk that line and see what I can do and what I can’t.”