Dez Fafara, frontman of DevilDriver and Coal Chamber, has gone public for the first time with a health battle he kept quiet for close to two years: a tumor, discovered after a sudden vertigo attack, that doctors have confirmed is not cancerous.
He shared the news on “The Garza Podcast“, hosted by Suicide Silence guitarist Chris Garza, explaining that the diagnosis grew out of the medical emergency that forced Coal Chamber to scrap a U.S. tour in 2024.
Fafara said the whole thing started on an ordinary afternoon, with vertigo that came from nowhere and knocked him flat.
He explained (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“The vertigo thing really f**king threw me off, dude, ’cause it was a great Saturday afternoon. I’d been running miles and miles on the treadmill every day, and all of a sudden I had vertigo out of nowhere, and that took me out for almost a year. They had to do all sorts of MRIs and all sorts of crazy s**t to me to figure out what the f**k was going on.”
He described the moment he collapsed at home:
“I don’t know if anybody’s ever experienced vertigo, but it happened on a Saturday afternoon. I ran upstairs, and next thing I knew, I was out cold on my floor. My wife was slapping my face to wake me up. I woke up spinning. Then next thing you know, I’m in an ambulance.”
At the hospital, scans meant to investigate the vertigo turned up something else entirely:
“My vitals were all over the place, and they did a head scan with me, and I came into the doc and he’s, like, ‘Hey, good news. I think you got the vertigo thing under control. I don’t think that’s really gonna happen anymore. But I wanna show you something.’ And it was a picture of my head, and you just saw a tumor.”
Fafara explained that he sat on the diagnosis so it wouldn’t derail work:
“You don’t wanna say this stuff before you book tours or before you’re doing deals or before you’re going out. But for, I would say, over a year, maybe almost two years now, we’ve been dealing with a situation where they found a tumor in my head.”
The most emotional part of his account came when he described waiting to learn whether the growth was malignant — a test that landed on Christmas Eve:
“And I’ll never forget. It was this little Chinese lady. She’s maybe five foot, and she goes, ‘I’ll be back in, like, 15 minutes and I’ll know.’ And I’m sitting in the chair, I’m, like, ‘You’ll know? Awesome.’”
He went on:
“When she left the room, I told [my wife], ‘Don’t talk. Don’t talk to me right now. Bow your head right now. We need to pray hard.’”
“When she came in and she was, like, ‘Hey, I got good news. It’s non-cancerous.’ Dude, I f**king jumped up. I scared the s**t out of this woman. I jumped up and hugged her and lifted her in the air.”
The tumor sits near Fafara‘s jawline, close to a salivary gland, and his doctors have chosen not to operate for now because of where it is. As he explained, surgery in that area carries real risk:
“It’s in my jawline, a little bit higher, on my saliva gland. And they’re, like, ‘It’s gotta be bigger for us to f**k with this because this could…’ It could affect my blinking, my smiling, my speaking.”
For that reason, the plan is monitoring rather than immediate intervention:
“So, they want me back in every six months. It’s gotta actually grow a little bit to be safe to go in [and operate], ’cause it’s very unsafe. If they go to get it now, I could lose speech and a lot of other stuff.”
Fafara said recent scans have been encouraging, with the growth reportedly measuring slightly smaller at his last visit — something he attributes to his diet, fasting, faith and outlook:
“And so I go in every six months. And because I fast and I do intermediate fasting, and right now I’m on a four-day fast. You never feel better than when you’re just drinking juices and stuff. I feel like I can look through walls. I think that has kept it not growing. So the last time I went in, it was a couple of months ago, and then [the doctor] said, ‘Hey, look, it’s actually gotten a little, little bit smaller, which we’ve never seen.’”
He continued: “And I said, ‘Well, part of that is probably prayer, a lot of it.’ And also just eating well and fasting, and I don’t do high carb and I don’t do a ton of sugar, and obviously no alcohol. But that’s what I’ve been dealing with.”
He is adamant about beating it on his own terms:
“I’m of the mindset, and this will give you a little power into me here, is that I’m gonna make it go away. I’m personally gonna make it go away with dieting, fasting and positive thought. It’s gonna go away. So the next time I go in is February or March, I think. And it’s gonna shrink more. It’s gonna go away. Period, end of story.”
Fafara said he chose to speak now because he felt fans deserved to know what had been going on out of view:
“I wanted to share that with you because I haven’t shared anything. I think people need to know. And obviously this is gonna go out on the wire and people are gonna go, ‘F**k, that’s what he’s dealing with.’”
He was clear, though, that he has no plans to slow down:
“But no, I’m not gonna cancel tours. I’m showing up in Australia [this summer]. I’m showing up in August. Nothing’s gonna stop that.”
The disclosure is the latest in a difficult stretch for Fafara, who nearly died from COVID-19 in 2021 and dealt with lasting heart complications afterward. His Coal Chamber bandmate, drummer Mikey “Bug” Cox, recently underwent what was described as his final planned surgery following a private cancer battle of his own.
DevilDriver released their latest album, Strike And Kill, on July 10 through Napalm Records. The band heads out on a western U.S. run with Upon A Burning Body and Ov Sulfur, opening August 14 in San Diego and closing September 5 in Anaheim.
