Adele is, thankfully, okay and resting her back after a flare-up of the spinal condition sciatica caused the singer to collapse backstage at her Las Vegas residency, “Weekends with Adele,” at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace. After she fell, she was unable to move, she told fans.
Sciatica, per People, “is caused by pain radiating from the sciatic nerve, causing extreme discomfort and pain in the legs and lower back.”
Adele told the crowd that “They picked my whole body up off the floor,” The Sun reports. “I am going to sit down and rest my sciatica.”
This isn’t the first time Adele has gotten candid with fans about health issues that have impacted her ability to move onstage. While performing on New Year’s Eve, People reports, “she hobbled across the stage, telling fans she suffers from chronic back pain and sciatica,” the outlet writes.
“I have to waddle these days, as I have really bad sciatica,” she said at the time. She later elaborated, sharing that she was performing with a disintegrated disc in her spine. “Is anyone else kind of my age starting getting bad knees?” she asked in February. “I have got really bad sciatica in my left leg and my L5 disc is not f—ing there anymore. It’s worn away.” The nerves on the L5 vertebra provide sensation to the outer side of your lower leg, the upper part of your foot, and the space between your first and second toe; a compressed L5 vertebrae nerve leads to sciatica, which can cause physical pain, numbness, and weakness.
In September 2022, Adele told Elle that she “slipped her L6 in January 2021, when [son] Angelo jumped out to scare her as she came out of the bathroom.” But, as she revealed in another interview from November 2021, her back issues go back to her teens: “I slipped my first disc when I was 15 from sneezing,” she said. “I was in bed, and I sneezed, and my fifth one flew out. In January, I slipped my sixth one, my L6. And then where I had a C-section, my core was useless.” She said she had “been in pain” with her back for around half of her life, and it would “flare up” when she was stressed or sitting with bad posture—but this changed when she started regularly working out, she said.
“Where I got my tummy strong, down at the bottom, which I never had before, my back don’t play up as much,” Adele said. “It means I can do more, I can run around with my kid a little bit more.”
