Rick Springfield details effects of brain injury from 25 years ago
Rick Springfield, 75, is revealing new details about the brain injury he sustained more than two decades ago.
During a “TODAY” segment on Thursday, the Grammy-award winner said he recently learned he had lasting damage from a bad fall during a Las Vegas concert her performed 25 years ago.
“I was doing the show in Vegas, and I fell actually 25 feet to a steel stage,” Springfield said on “TODAY” during his first on-camera interview since breaking the news.
During a midshow stunt, Springfield was meant to be suspended from a beam on a gravity-fed harness system, but “it wasn’t tied off,” the singer revealed. “I slammed (onto the stage), and then the beam hit me on the head and then my head hit the (stage) again.”
At the time, doctors thought he’d only broken his wrist. “They checked me out, and it seemed to be OK,” he recalled. But following a recent full-body MRI scan, he learned he’d suffered a brain injury all those years ago.
He admitted to feeling uneasy ahead of the scan, worried doctors would discover something serious. “That’s a very scary thing, because could that thing come up that you’ve always worried about, you know?”
While they did find brain damage and scarring, Springfield says it’s being monitored, and “we’re just watching it.”
In the end, the singer said it was worth knowing these details about his health despite his anxiety beforehand. His father was the kind of person who avoided investigating his health, and Springfield was reluctant to repeat history, he told People in March.
“My dad died from not wanting to know,” Springfield said. “He thought he had stomach cancer for years and never got it checked out. When he finally collapsed one day at home, they found out it was an ulcer that burst, and he died from the loss of blood. It could have been fixed if he had gotten it checked out.”
He went on: “That was a giant message to me: If you want to live long, you have to be prepared for some bad news now and then. I could find out I have terminal cancer tomorrow and be dead in a year, but I can only do all I can do.”
On “TODAY,” Springfield, a soon-to-be grandfather, said that the injury hasn’t affected him much, and he’s preparing for a tour that begins this month.