Tarek El Moussa Recalls Crawling to Hospital Door After Back Injury: ‘All I Could Say Was, “Please Help Me”‘

• Tarek El Moussa seriously injured his back in 2015 shortly after recovering from cancer
• His injury was caused by several slipped discs that pinched the sciatic nerve in his lower back.
• In his new book, the HGTV star writes about the traumatic incident that forced him to crawl to the hospital door, Turn your life around

Tarek El Moussa relives one of his most painful memories in his new book.

IN Turn Your Life Around: How to Find Opportunity in Adversity—In Real Estate, Business, and Life (out Feb. 6), the 42-year-old HGTV star opens up about a back injury that left him in the “worst pain” of his life just nine months after finishing cancer treatment. It started during a simple game of golf, he says.

“I was finishing one of the last holes of the course when I felt a cramp in my back. Something was obviously wrong because the pain was constant,” El Moussa recalls. He adds that even though he knew he should have stopped playing “immediately”, he still pushed through the game.

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Tarek El Moussa injured his back while playing golf.

Tarek El Moussa/TikTok

And then things went really bad.

“On the next tee, I set up to drive and swing. As I descended to pass through them, I was suddenly on the ground, overcome with the worst pain I had ever felt in my life.” Flipping the El Moussas continues the host.

He says that the feeling “radiated” through his entire body, and his lower back and legs “were burning.”

His friends helped him into the golf cart, drove him to his car and he managed to drive himself to the hospital. But when he stopped at the emergency room, it says: “[I] opened the car door and tried to get out, I fell on the pavement. I started crawling to the door. The nurses came running. All I could say was, ‘Please help me’.”

The incident on the golf course was the start of “fifteen months of a whole new medical challenge,” the dad-of-three writes, as a result of several slipped discs that pinched the sciatic nerve in his lower back.

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The ‘Flip or Flop’ star shared this photo of him in hospital after injuring his back for the second time in 2018.

Tarek El Moussa/Instagram

Treatment would lead to even bigger problems for El Moussa. “Immediately my life became a hamster wheel of pain meds, medical professionals and physical therapy, but nothing worked,” she writes. He was taking Vicodin, Dilaudid and morphine.

Speaking to PEOPLE about the aftermath of his injury, he recalled, “After that I had that horrible surgery with complications. And then I got testosterone after that, and then Christina dumped me. So 2013, ’14, ’15, four year, I just lived through hell.”

Christina Hall was by El Moussa’s side while he was in the hospital after cancer treatment. Source: Tarek El Moussa/Instagram

In addition to his nagging health problems, Turn your life around goes deep into El Moussa’s relationship with his ex-wife and Flip or flop co-host Christina Hall,

He told his version of his “very public divorce,” including a 2016 incident involving a gun and a 911 call that ended their marriage, after which he went through testosterone withdrawal and went to rehab for two months.

Tarek El Moussa opens up about his divorce and the terrifying misstep on the road to recovery

The cover of “Flip Your Life” will be released on February 6, 2024.

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The exes have two children, daughter Taylor, 13, and son Brayden, 8. After the split, both remarried and expanded their families. El Moussa has a one-year-old son, Tristan, with his wife. Selling Sunset alum Heather El Moussa. Hall got married Celebrity IOU: Joyride presenter Ant Anstead, with whom she shares son Hudson, 4. They divorced in 2020, and she later married estate agent Josh Hall in 2022.

Tarek and Heather Rae El Moussa in June 2022.

Jeff Kravitz/Getty

Speaking to PEOPLE in January, El Moussa revealed that he holds nothing against his ex-wife despite their rocky divorce.

“I have nothing against Christina. I understand why she did what she did. We’ve had a lot of tough years through my illnesses and my mental health issues,” he says. And their relationship and Tarek’s health are in a better place than they’ve been in a long time: “I never gave up through a lot of hard work, pain and just dreaming, I was able to get to where I am today.”

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