Country music star Clay Walker has been open with fans about his long battle with multiple sclerosis, and in a new interview with People Magazine he has revealed that he has had a tough year dealing with the disease.
Walker, 56, made headlines earlier this year when he was forced to cancel a show in Hot Springs, Arkansas to undergo a procedure to help his battle against MS.
“At the beginning of the year, I noticed I was having a lot of difficulty with balance and walking, and it really started to worry me,” Walker told People. “I knew I had to do something.”
The outlet reported that Walker’s procedure was to implant a baclofen pump. People said that device delivers “the anti-spasticity medication baclofen directly into the spinal fluid.”
“The surgery gave me a lot of hope,” Walker told People. “But so far, you know, it’s not great. It hasn’t done what I wanted it to. Balance has been an issue lately.
“Am I walking perfect? No.” Walker added. “Am I walking better? Absolutely. I got on a treadmill the other day without a harness holding me up to keep me from falling, and I walked five minutes. That’s progress.”
While it’s not perfect, Walker admitted to People that when he was first diagnosed with the disease back in 1996, the outlook was “horrific.”
“I was told that I wouldn’t be around very long and that I’d be in a wheelchair and that I would be dead pretty quick because of the amount of lesions that I had on my spinal cord and brainstem and brain,” he said.
That has given Walker some amazing perspective.
“We turned everything upside down,” he told People. “We already won the battle, you know? We’ve got that to celebrate.”
Still, Walker told People that he is “going through a rough patch right now.”
“Does it bother me that people have to watch me struggle to get off stage?” Walker said. “Yes, I does. But my band is very in tune with me, and they know if I’m struggling or not. All it takes is a glance. They are always there, especially my bass player (Curt Walsh). I’m like, ‘Dude, if you see me falling, fall in front of me so I don’t get hurt.”
Walker was 26 at the time that he was first diagnosed, and he was one of the brightest young stars in country music. Taste of Country said that the singer started his Clay Walker Foundation at the time and had raised $2.6 million as of 2024 for multiple sclerosis research.
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