Ellen DeGeneres Gets Candid About Mysterious Neck Injury, Shares Update

After stepping onto the stage of her daytime talk show with the help of crutches on Tuesday, Ellen DeGeneres is opening up about her mysterious neck injury, a sprained neck. The talk show host revealed the injury during Tuesday’s episode of her namesake show, though she admits that she has “no idea” how she sustained it.

“The good news is that I don’t need these. The bad news is I hurt my neck,” DeGeneres told her in-studio audience as she tossed the crutches aside. “You want to know how I did it? So do I! I have no idea.”

According to DeGeneres, she “spent the morning watching tennis and then the afternoon some bird watching.” At night, she joked, “we did the hula-hooping on our necks.”

Although she woke up feeling “fit as a fiddle,” tings quickly took a turn for the worse.

“I went to turn my head and then my neck disagreed with that situation. It just seized up and then I felt like there was a rod going down my back and I thought, ‘Well, if I just ignore it, it would go away,’ like a toothache or global warming,” she recalled. “But it did not.”

The pain was so severe that DeGeneres even went to the chiropractor, who reportedly listed a number of things she has wrong.

“He said my feet don’t point in the right direction, one leg is longer than the other, my shoulders are humped, my hips are uneven… basically, he said nothing about me is straight,” she said. “I don’t need to pay you $175 to hear that!”

The talk show host then got much more serious, reflecting on “our body is like a string of Christmas lights and one light goes out, the whole string goes out and it gets into a tiny, crazy knot in the back of your head that you can’t untangle and you’re in so much pain that you just want to get lit.”

“You should’ve seen me this morning. It’s loosening up as the day goes on. Kind of like The Today Show,” she joked.

By Wednesday, DeGeneres stepped out with a cast on her arm, stating that she had “good news and I have bad news” before she took the cast off. She went on to reveal that she had finally received some answers and had actually sprained her neck.

“But the bad news is I sprained my neck,” she said. “I thought I strained it, but it turns out I sprained it. That’s how the chiropractor ‘splained it.”