Country singer Justin Moore is opening up about a recent health scare after seeing a growth on his neck.
“I’ve had some health issues. Nothing life-threatening, thankfully. I don’t know if you can see this on my neck, I’m sure people think, ‘Golly, he’s been eatin’ good,’” Moore, 42, said during a Wednesday, August 19, episode of Tracy Lawrence’s “TL’s Road House” podcast. “We thought it was called a lipoma. But it’s just fat. It’s benign, thank God. And they told me it would be very, very difficult to do surgery, and it may affect my singing, and even my speaking voice.”
While Moore said the growth “doesn’t affect” him, he quipped that he looks like a “linebacker circa 1982” with a “thick neck.”
“My wife [Kate Moore] and I were walking out of the hospital when I had an MRI or something and they had told us, ‘Man, great news. It’s benign, but there’s really not anything we can do about it,’” he recalled. “So I was kind of bummed out walking out of the hospital, cause at the time we didn’t know if it was cancer. We didn’t know what it was, you know, and of course your mind takes you to the worst possible places obviously.”
He continued, “And my wife looked at me, she goes, ‘If you just have a fat neck and you’re here for the next 50 years, then shut up and stop complaining.’”
Prior to the health scare, Moore had gone roughly a decade without seeing a doctor.
“I hadn’t gone to the doctor, up until last year, in probably 10 years,” he said. “My grandfathers greatly influenced me, and they were the type that it’s like, if a limb’s hanging off and you’re working, you just kinda tape it back up and go for it, so I was the same way.”
The “Small Town USA” hitmaker shared that he didn’t begin drinking until he was 21 years old and hadn’t faced a health scare “whatsoever” in two decades.
“Then COVID hit and we were doing our podcast at the time and literally nothing else. Man, idle hands are the devil’s workshop is a real thing. A drink at 5, turned into 3 and noon. Then before you know it, it’s all day every day. Not even really getting smashed, just constantly having a cocktail,” he said. “It started affecting my life. Just like everybody else, you think, ‘Oh, nobody knows. I’m hiding this. I’m good. I’m functioning, high functioning.’ I was to an extent.”
Moore said that he was putting “so much energy into drinking” that it was taking away from his “professionalism” and his family and church.
“I came home one Sunday … I walked straight upstairs and told my wife, ‘I gotta go get help. I just gotta do it. I have to do it.’ It wasn’t fun. … But I just looked at it like a business trip, you know. Today is my 65th day sober,” he said. “I feel good, man. I feel like myself for the first time in a while. And I’m actually proud of myself for the first time in a while.”
