"I was going to die": Grant Denyer's brutal wake up call
Grant Denyer has spoken candidly about a brutal wake up call he received from a doctor, when he was told he would die if he didn't start looking after himself.
The TV host opened up on the Mental As Anyone podcast about how he would repeatedly push himself too far, and the moment he was forced to reevaluate his priorities.
“I was skinny as a rake and unhealthy as hell and the doctor said my organs were running at about seven per cent,” Denyer told the podcast.
“He goes, ‘if you don’t do something about this in the next four weeks, you’re going to die. It took two lessons for me to realise that I had to change my mindset and how I was approaching life and what I prioritised as important until I learned the lesson and I feel like if I hadn’t learned it the second time, it would have been fatal the third.”
The first lesson came to Denyer in the form of a brutal car crash, and the second being chronic fatigue telling him his body needed to stop.
“I broke my back, which I firmly now believe was not as a result of jumping seven cars in a monster truck but as a result of ignoring all my bodily signs, ignoring all the signals my body was trying to give me to slow the hell down,” he said.
“You can’t sustain this pace and this grind and this aggressive chase for the next rung of the ladder, because you will die. As my body was deteriorating and my mental health was deteriorating, the monster truck crash came along to sit me on my arse.”
Denyer also opened up about having to rely on prescription painkillers after his car accident, and how he struggled battling the pain and the effects of the medication.
“It messed with me instantly and majorly,” he said. “To give you an idea, the moment you close your eyes at night time, you fall into your worst nightmares every time instantly and you can’t differentiate between dream and reality so when you wake up, you firmly believed what you have just dreamt, indeed actually just did happen. It was horrible.”
"It is important to reflect on because it is the lows that make the highs and those euphoric moments feel high and that was one of the lows. I think in recognising (and) giving voice to those moments of low, that you can celebrate mediocre a lot more and enjoy that.”
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