Ben Feldman has recently revealed that he wrote a will after learning that he needed immediate spinal surgery in his neck, stating “it was horrifying,” according to PEOPLE.
The 41-year-old actor explained on Wednesday’s episode of Hypochondriactor, the podcast hosted by actor Sean Hayes and Dr. Priyanka Wali, that he had ignored his back pain.
He said, “When I was 24, I was shooting a movie in Toronto, was in like a hotel gym and I was like, ‘I feel a pain in my back.’ But I’m 24, so obviously, that will go away soon. And then, it just never did. And then, I had all of these back problems forever.”
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Feldman’s wife, Michelle Mulitz, pushed him to check with a doctor to look at his back.
The Superstore star said, “He [the doctor] was like, ‘Oh, God, your discs between five and six, and six and seven in your neck are really bad,’” but the doctor “basically said that I don’t need to do something right away, but also don’t get into a car accident or go skiing or anything like that.”
And then last summer, when some restrictions were lifted, Mulitz once again sent him back for more imaging “and the doctor goes, ‘Oh, wait, never mind, this is immediate. Even your window for getting the surgery is closing.’ And it was like, the fluid around my spinal cord … was just gone. It was just bone to cord.”
Feldman said hearing that was “horrifying,” and decided to write a will as he was about to undergo surgery in July 2020.
He recalled, “I wrote a will on a napkin in a hotel. I’m concerned I’m going to die, so I wrote a will.”
“After I got the surgery, it was so easy that I was bummed because I wanted people to be like, ‘Oh, my god, I’m so sorry, Ben, that must have been awful,’” she said. “So I talk it up. I talked about the fear that I had, because I can’t talk about the actual procedure, which was two hours and then a couple of drugs and then about two weeks of watching Love Island U.K. in bed with my wife and then it was fine.”
Feldman said jokingly that he is “the opposite of a hypochondriac” and always “just assumed that everything will fix itself eventually,” but he said this experience taught him not to ignore his pain.
“My takeaway was, go to doctors more,” he said. “Because if I had ignored this, and had someone had bumped into me going skiing or whatever, I wouldn’t be able to pee correctly anymore.”
