“You’re not supposed to move,” Cowell said, although that was not how he was thinking at the time. “I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to get back into the house because I can’t lie there’… and made myself kind of get carried into my bedroom, which is right there at the beginning of the house, and I’m lying there and I’m kind of passing out… It was surreal.”

Cowell told his ex-girlfriend Terri Seymour that “In fact, you and Lauren [Silverman] were outside the hospital all night long, I remember.”

“Lauren was amazing, running around after you, nursing you back to health,” Seymour said of Cowell’s wife.

“She was amazing,” Cowell gushed. “Both her and Eric, they were like my support. I couldn’t have gotten through it without them, so we got closer.”

Eric is Cowell’s young son. The reality television star went on to admit that coming home from the hospital was notes for him.

“The hardest thing was, and I said this to Lauren when I came out of the hospital… I was so embarrassed about coming home looking about 100 because I couldn’t walk, and I have these metal rods in my back and these screws… I said, ‘Lauren, I just don’t know how to explain it to [Eric].’ She obviously said something to him because he came in… and I was lying in bed and he said, ‘Daddy, you’re like Ironman,’ and I thought that was the sweetest thing and it meant a lot,” Cowell recalled.

As for what the toughest part of his recovery was, Cowell said, “The helplessness. I’ve never been in this situation in my life where you literally can’t move. The pain was off the charts… But you’ve got to stay positive… I made a promise to myself I’d be fitter than I was before I had the accident. Sure enough, that’s what happened.”

Though Cowell is now back to work, he made a point of saying how proud he was that the show kept going without him.

“They were almost too good,” he said. “I was watching the show thinking, ‘Can you not be great?’ and they were great.”

Check out Cowell’s full interview below.