Photo: Redferns
In September, Deryck Whibley revealed to fans that he was in the hospital with COVID, pneumonia and heart failure, and though he was home he wasn't "out of the woods." In a new interview with GQ, the Sum 41 frontman revealed that he actually almost died during his hospital stay and described how it felt looking into the face of death.
“When I got to the emergency room that night they told me, ‘You’ll probably be here a few hours, you should be able to go home,’” he recalled. But that didn't happen. Instead, Whibley was told at 3 AM that he was being transferred to another hospital because his heart needed to be monitored for potential failure. “Up to that point, I was like, I’ve been through this s*** before, I’ll be fine. But when the doctor was that concerned, that’s what made it scariest for me. I could feel my heart having a hard time. I was struggling to breathe. My chest felt really tight.”
But Whibley was more bummed than scared at the thought of dying. “I remember saying to my wife in the hospital, ‘I'm going to be really bummed if I die,’" he admitted. "I wasn't scared of it. I was just like, ‘This will suck. I’ve got so much cool s*** going on right now.’”
Elsewhere in the interview, Whibley opened up about Sum 41 breaking up after a farewell tour. He explained how in 2019 he felt tired of touring for the first time. “Normally I get excited about, like, ‘Wow, look at all this. It’s great,’” he said. “All these shows were huge, a lot of them were sold out already. It was a really long tour and I didn’t even have kids yet. But for the first time, I was looking at it, and I went, ‘I don’t know if I want to be out that long.’ That was the first time I’d ever said that in my life.”
Sum 41 is playing at iHeartRadio ALTer EGO 2024, which takes place on January 13th. Paramore, The 1975, The Black Keys, Thirty Seconds to Mars, BUSH, Yellowcard, lovelytheband and The Last Dinner Party are also on the bill. Fans across the country will be able to listen to this year's iHeartRadio ALTer EGO live as the show will be broadcast across iHeartRadio alternative and rock stations across the country, and on the free iHeartRadio app.