Adam DeVine was told he may be dying due to injuries he sustained as a child.
The 41-year-old star of Pitch Perfect has battled a number of health conditions through the years and has shared that at one point doctors told him that he may not have long to live.
DeVine was just 11-years-old when he was hit by a cement truck while crossing the road with his bike. He was told that he lived because the bike absorbed some of the impact. However, he was forced to undergo 25 surgeries in the aftermath of the incident.
The actor and comedian said the last three years of his life have “been a nightmare” as he experiences “so much pain” and has been “having spasms all over”, in an episode of In Depth with Graham Bensinger. He said it “hurts to sit for too long, it hurts to stand for too long, and it hurts to walk for too long.”
After ruling out hip problems, he was told he could be suffering from a rare autoimmune condition, stiff-person syndrome (SPS), an illness that singer Celine Dion also lives with. SPS causes muscle stiffness and spasms.
Medical professionals were left bewildered by his condition as they admitted they “don’t really know” what was happening with the actor.
“For a while, they told me I was dying, literally, within this last year they told me that,” he shared.
Although death by SPS is considered a rare event, DeVine says he was told that “the average life expectancy is six years for someone who has it, and they told me that I had that literally a month before my son Beau was born.”
DeVine married his The Final Girls co-star Chloe Bridges in 2021, with the couple announcing they were expecting their first child in 2023. In February 2024, they announced their son Beau DeVine had been born.
He explained: “Your muscles get so tight that you can no longer walk, you can no longer move, then your heart will stop beating because your heart is a muscle and it gets too tight to beat, and then you die.”
He continued: “I thought, ‘Great, I’m going to die. My son will only know a crippled father.’ And then they told me, ‘We don’t think you have that’.”
After visiting the man who coined the term “stiff-person syndrome”, DeVine was told that his symptoms were more likely the result of his childhood injuries than any new condition. Although, he still called the symptoms “unexplainable”.
“I think I just got so tight and so tightly wound, and my body has all these things that are a little wonky and a little wrong with it, that I just sort of snapped,” he explained as he attributed his recurring pains to increased activity in the gym and during the pandemic. “I think I’m still dealing with it, but it’s been three years now.”
