"George Clooney had neck surgery this morning, and they gave him fentanyl. “I'm out of it now,” he says, not seeming out of it at all. Clooney shows me the neck brace they sent him home with. It's the typical big white priest's collar thing, which he has decided not to wear, except when he needs some sympathy. Then he'll reach for the brace and put it on and grin like George Clooney. The neck surgery was relatively minor, for a disk problem, but when the doctors got in there, they found all kinds of other stuff too. “It looks like arthritis, unfortunately,” Clooney says cheerfully. “Which: Hey, isn't it nice getting older?”
The disk problem was the result of a 2018 motorcycle accident Clooney had in Italy, or maybe it started before then. An interesting and perhaps surprising fact about Clooney, who projects comfort and ease like a lighthouse projects light, is that he's actually been in a significant amount of daily discomfort for the past 15 years. While he was shooting a scene in 2005's
Syriana, someone kicked over the chair Clooney was sitting in, and he tore his dura mater, which is the wrap around the spine that holds in the spinal fluid. The spinal fluid was leaking out of his nose. Clooney has said before that he was in so much pain he contemplated suicide. He spent “three or four months really laying into painkillers,” he told me. Then he went to a pain guy.
The pain guy told him that the thing about pain is that it's just the body registering a departure from what it regards as “normal.” If you can train yourself to think of pain as normal, then the pain will cease to exist. “Basically,” Clooney says, “the idea is, you try to reset your pain threshold. Because a lot of times what happens with pain is you're constantly mourning for how it used to feel.” But Clooney is not the mourning type, and he'd sooner leak spinal fluid from his nose again than be maudlin or boring, so he tells this story about excruciating pain and the way he mindfucked himself out of it with a wry grin and a good deal of self-mockery, as he does most sad stories."
gq.com
