Michael J Fox reveals shock spinal cord health battle

Actor Michael J. Fox. Photo / Getty Images

Michael J. Fox has revealed a shocking new health struggle he's been dealing with over the past year.

The Back to the Future star, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1991, recently opened up to the New York Times about a spinal cord injury.

He said: "I was having the recurring problem with my spinal cord. I was told it was benign, but if it stayed static I would have diminished feeling in my legs and difficulty moving."

The 57-year-old said suddenly he started falling down often and was having trouble differentiating which symptoms were due to his spinal cord and which were due to the Parkinson's - "it was getting ridiculous".

"It came to the point where it was probably necessary to have surgery. So I had surgery, and an intense amount of physical therapy after. I did it all, and eventually people asked me to do some acting. Last August I was supposed to go to work. I woke up, walked into the kitchen to get breakfast, misstepped and I went down. I fractured the hell out of my arm. I ended up getting 19 pins and a plate. It was such a blow," he said.

In dealing with it all though, he says he tries not to get "too New Age-y", and isn't the kind of person who likes to talk about things happening "for a reason".

However he did say: "The more unexpected something is, the more there is to learn from it. In my case, what was it that made me skip down the hallway to the kitchen thinking I was fine when I'd been in a wheelchair six months earlier? It's because I had certain optimistic expectations of myself, and I'd had results to bear out those expectations, but I'd had failures too. And I hadn't given the failures equal weight."

Fox is now on the mend and is working on a new book about his health issues.

He said: "My health issues last year brought me to places where I started to say, 'Was it false hope I'd been selling? Is there a line beyond which there is no consolation?' For me to get to that place is pretty dark.

"I realized that the understanding I'd reached with Parkinson's was sincere but risked being glib. I'd made peace with the disease but presumed others had that same relationship when they didn't.

"Then when I started to deal with the effects from the spinal surgery, I realized: Wow, it can get a lot worse. Being in a position where I couldn't walk and had health aides 24 hours a day, was I still prepared to say, 'Hey, chin up!' Parkinson's, it's a strange test."