Deryck Whibley Celebrates 10 Years Sober After 2014 Hospitalization for Alcohol Abuse (Exclusive)

In 2014, the Sum 41 frontman spent a month in the hospital after his alcohol abuse caused him liver and kidney failure

Call it a premonition or pure naïveté, but Sum 41's Deryck Whibley knew for a fact when he was 16 that he was going to be famous someday.

"I mean, I was just so obsessed with music, and this was, at that time, pre-internet, so I didn't know a lot of information about rock stars except for the chaos and craziness," Whibley tells PEOPLE over a Zoom call from his home studio in Las Vegas. "Every major rock star was either getting arrested or going to the hospital, so that's all I ever knew of being what a rock star was. I, at that age was like, 'That's going to be me one day.' And then sure enough, it all came true."

Indeed, during his past 28 years with the band, Whibley — who released his eighth and final Sum 41 album Heaven :x: Hell on March 29 — has lived the life of a true rock star: partying, worldwide tours, high-profile breakups and a battle with alcohol addiction that landed him in the hospital with kidney and liver failure, included.

But no matter how dark things got, Whibley, 44, says he wouldn't change a thing.

"People ask me a lot of times over the years, 'Do you regret things or do you wish that didn't happen?' Or, 'I'm so sorry you went through that,'" he says. "I'm like, 'I'm so thankful I went through those hard times.' How boring would my life be if I had never struggled for anything?"

Related: Deryck Whibley Says Sum 41's Final Album Is the 'Record I've Always Wanted to Make' (Exclusive)

Fame came fast and furious for Whibley after Sum 41 was signed to Island Records in 1999, when he was fresh out of high school. They released their first EP, Half Hour of Power, in 2000 and their debut album All Killer No Filler — featuring hits like "Fat Lip" and "In Too Deep" — a year later,

"When things started taking off, all of a sudden we were on MTV and the radio and songs were going No. 1 and all this stuff," he says. "It happened quickly once it started. It was just such a whirlwind. We were only 20 years old, flying in private jets all of a sudden, taking helicopters to shows and hanging out with our heroes. People from Iron Maiden are showing up at our own shows and bringing their kids to meet us and stuff like that. It was like six months ago, we were nobodies and here's all this."

As his fame rose, interest in his personal life also grew. His brief romance with Paris Hilton and his marriage to and eventual divorce from Avril Lavigne were highly publicized.

"I hated all that stuff," Whibley says. "I'm better now than I was back then, but I've always been a more quiet, shy, homebody person. I don't mind being out there on stage and promoting music and doing as much work as I can to push Sum 41's music, but the second it was on something personal, I really hated that part and really found that uncomfortable and really difficult to navigate. I wasn't very good at it."

When he looks back on those moments of being followed by paparazzi in his early career, Whibley says he remembers most feeling "surprised."

"If paparazzi jumped out of nowhere, I was always surprised that it was happening, so I never felt like I was prepared," he says. "My reaction was always very defensive, or I'd get angry and I'd walk away and I'd say, 'I wish I didn't react that way.' Not that anything bad ever really happened. I didn't get in any fights or anything, but I always felt like I was more rude than I am as a person. I'm not that kind of person, but these people jump out of nowhere or something, or you feel this invasion and you just react a certain way. I was also only in my early 20s, and it was just a weird time. You do sort of figure out some way to coexist."

Related: Sum 41’s Deryck Whibley Shares Cover of Memoir, Walking Disaster (Exclusive)

After he and Lavigne got divorced in 2010, Whibley says he wasn't looking for love again. But as it so often goes, it found him.

"I was in a period of my life where I was partying a lot, I was on tour a lot and I was just passing in and out of town for days," he says. "I was not thinking about a relationship whatsoever. I had some friends living with me that were all single too, and we were just having a good time traveling and being on the road. I'd come out of a divorce, which I was just like, 'I don't want to get back into a relationship. I like my freedom. This is great.'"

That all changed though when a friend of his told him he needed to meet this group of girls he knew. The group included Whibley's now-wife of nearly nine years, Ariana Cooper.

"He was like, 'They're really cool. They're these models,'" he recalls. "I was like, 'I don't want to meet models. I have no interest.' In my experience, you can't have a conversation. He was like, 'I'm telling you, these girls are different. There's a group of three of them, and they're super sweet.' I kept pushing it off, and then one day after two or three months of him telling me about these girls, we ran into them by accident, and we ended up hanging out with them."

During that meeting, "I ended up talking to Ariana all night," he says, "and that's all we did was talk."

"I was just like, 'OK, my friend was right. She's super cool. Yes, she happens to be beautiful and tall, but she's one of the best people that I've ever met,'" he continues. "And from that moment on, we just stayed in contact almost daily. Within six months we were dating, and then within a year she moved in."

Related: Sum 41's Deryck Whibley and Wife Ari on How They Found Healing After Her 2013 Suicide Attempt

Amidst their romance, Whibley says he and Cooper, 33, quickly found that they were also "great" drinking partners.

"We both had fallen into this pattern together, and we were both crossing this invisible line, and we were both just good drinking buddies, so we weren't able to stop each other," he says. "We weren't necessarily encouraging each other, but we weren't able to stop each other at the same time. We both increased as time went on. Then the next thing we know is we're both just finishing a huge bottle of vodka or Jack a day without even noticing it."

Whibley often drank as a means to subside the symptoms of his long-lingering back pain, which was exacerbated in 2010 when he was beaten up by several strangers in a Tokyo bar while on a tour stop there.

"Because it was just nonstop touring, I never really took care of it," he says. "Things got worse, and I got to a point where we just put out a record, and I injured my back again for I think the third time. And it was really, really bad and really painful. The only options were to go home, cancel the rest of the years of touring and let that album just die, or take heavy painkillers. I don't remember what they were, but after seeing what became of the [oxycodone] epidemic across the U.S., I didn't really want to take any of that stuff."

"What I did notice was, when I had a couple drinks at night, my back pain would go away," he continues. "So I just thought, you know what? I can get through the tour because I pop some Advil, have a couple drinks, and I think I'll be fine. I just kept going on the tour."

Related: Sum 41 Announces Final Tour Dates and Last-Ever Show Ahead of Their Separation as a Band

As his pain got worse, "my drinking started earlier in the day," he says. "It just kept getting earlier and earlier because I was trying to self-medicate, trying to get through the tour."

Whibley soon noticed physical signs that his body was becoming dependent on alcohol.

"All of a sudden if I didn't have a drink, my body starts shaking, my hands are shaking, and I would say to myself, 'I don't really want to drink right now,'" he says. "But I had realized like, 'Oh my God, I'm having withdrawal syndrome, so I have to have a drink.' Then everything would mellow out. I'd feel better. But then you also feel good, because you just had a drink or two and you're like, 'Man, well, let's have another one. I've already had two. What's three?' And then, 'What's one more?' It just gets worse and worse and worse."

One evening while Whibley was pouring himself a drink in April 2014, a feeling of overwhelming pain came over him.

"I just collapsed, and I barely really remember much after that," he says. "I do remember saying, 'I've got to go to the hospital. Something's wrong. This is not normal.' I don't really remember getting to the hospital, but once I was there, they put me in an induced coma for a few days, and then I was sedated for another week. So that whole first little bit was pretty blurry."

When Whibley finally came to, doctors told him that his liver and kidneys had failed. He spent the next month at the hospital, in and out of the ICU.

"It was very touch and go," he says. "But I will say through that whole process of being there, it felt similar to when I was 16 and saying, 'I will be a successful musician.' I always was like, 'Everyone seems really nervous right now, but I'll be fine. I know I'm going to get out of here.' I felt like it just wasn't my time yet, and that I would get out. Sure enough, I did."

Related: Sum 41's Deryck Whibley, a Year After Alcohol Overdose: 'I'm in the Best Shape of My Life'

When he got out of the hospital in May 2014, Whibley faced an uphill battle as he tried to walk again.

"I had so much nerve damage in my feet, and that was one of the hardest things," he says. "While I was in the hospital for four weeks, I was just in a bed and I couldn't move, and I had retained so much bile and poison from all the drinking that my feet had swollen up. I had edema, and it just caused all this nerve damage. My feet were in so much pain that it felt like I was walking on broken glass or hot coals all the time. So I couldn't stand on my feet for more than 30 seconds without having to get off. It felt like I was standing hot coals."

Whibley also had trouble playing guitar, and he questioned whether he could be creative without drinking.

"Everything was just starting from zero," he says. "I was terrified that first year. I never created music while drinking, but I used to believe that having the excitement of going out and partying made me creative."

Still, Whibley remained committed to sobriety, and over time, his pain started to slowly subside. By Christmas, he was walking on his own, and by July 2015, Whibley — still unsure whether he'd be able to stand for longer than 15 minutes at a time — asked his manager to book him a couple "under the radar" solo shows at small bars.

"I did three shows in a row, and they were great," he says. "I couldn't stand more than 10 minutes at home, but the second I started playing music, I was like, 'I could play two hours.' After that first show, I talked to my manager, I said, 'Book a Sum 41 tour. I'm back. Let's get it going for next year. Start booking shows. I can do this.'"

Related: Sum 41's Deryck Whibley Hospitalized with Pneumonia, Wife Says: 'We Spent the Entire Night in the ER'

A tour was booked for 2016.

"That whole 2016 of touring and into '17, I wasn't really technically ready to be on stage, but being on stage forced me to get stronger, and it worked all those muscles," he says. "I just figured it out."

Whibley and his wife were also quick to readjust their relationship without drinking.

"A lot of people around us thought that we would break up because it seemed like we were just great drinking buddies, but I think she and I always knew that we had a deeper connection," he says. "It was only something we found out later when people would tell us, 'We thought you guys were never going to last.' We didn't think that at all. We still had the same connection. We still talked all day, the same way we did while we were drinking. We just had better conversations and things just got tighter and stronger and better, and it still continues to get better."

And despite concerns about his creativity, "I found that my life is more exciting sober than it ever was when I was drinking," he says.

These days, Whibley is busy gearing up for the U.S. leg of Sum 41's final worldwide tour, Tour of the Setting Sum, kicking off April 19. He's also enjoying his quiet life at home in Vegas with Cooper and their 4-year-old son Lydon and 13-month-old daughter Quentin.

"I loved living in L.A. while I was there, but being sober, having children and being married, there wasn't a lot that I was doing outside of the house in L.A.," he says. "When I was there early on, we were going out to restaurants and going out to clubs and bars, and every time I came home from tour, no matter what day of the week it was, there was something going on. So when I was 24, that's awesome. But now I'm 44, a homebody and I've got kids that wake up at 5 a.m."

Related: Sum 41's Deryck Whibley Discharged from Hospital After 'Responding So Well' to Pneumonia Treatments, Wife Says

After the tour, Whibley will release his new memoir, Walking Disaster, on Oct. 8.

"As this chapter of my life felt like it was coming to an end, I felt like I'd rather do the book now and make it part of this chapter rather than move on from the band and then in five years or 10 years from now, bring up all the old stories to talk about," he says. "I'd rather do it all at once and leave this chapter behind and start a new chapter."

Even though the band is saying goodbye on their last tour date on May 14, Sum 41 will continue to be a big presence in Whibley's house.

"We brought the kids to a music video on this latest record, and that was the first time my son got to see me performing on camera," he says. "Since seeing the video afterwards, he's become the biggest super fan, and now it's just Sum 41 getting played all the time at the house."

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