WWE star KevinOwens has provided an update on his injury and when he will likely have surgery on his neck.
Owens had to step away ahead of WrestleMania earlier this year due to a neck injury, and his time on the sidelines has been frustrating for "The Prizefighter," which he talked about on his appearance on Cody Rhodes' "What Do You Wanna Talk About?" podcast. Owens revealed that the injury happened in a match in January and that he learnt about the seriousness of it in April.
"It's been such a frustrating process. We're kind of trying to let my spinal cord heal as much as we can on its own before we go on for the surgery, because the extent, how extensive the surgery will be, depends on how my spinal cord looks when we go in there," he said. "The trauma happened in January well, probably it was building up but January is what made it, you know, what really did it. Then we had this nice and easy ladder match where nothing crazy happened at all. And I kept going for a while, and then in the first week of April is when we had the MRI, and they were like, 'Guess what, you can't even get hit. Don't even get hit, 'cause you might die."
Owens confirmed that he will have surgery sometime next month, four months after his last match inWWE.
"We're waiting till mid-July to do the surgery. Hopefully, it's a normal neck fusion. It might not be. We don't know," revealed Owens.
KevinOwens also detailed in the podcast the painful symptoms he has had recently, which he didn't experience earlier.
"Since then, I felt fine, my neck's been fine. I'm not in pain, I have no really any symptoms of what you would expect somebody with a spinal cord injury to have," said Owens. "In the last week, for some reason, the symptoms all came in one shot. Every symptom you'd expect me to have the pain in the neck, the stuff going down, the arms, the legs not really responding, it's all been happening. So it's been pretty brutal. I can't wait for the surgery and then to move forward, whatever that looks like."
Owens recounted an incident during a match when his legs went numb, leading him to believe something was wrong with his body. Doctors initially suspected another part of the body as the source of the problem, but tests eventually confirmed that the issue stemmed from his neck.
"So we had two incidents where basically in the ring, my legs kind of fell asleep and I was like, 'There's something wrong.' We thought it was one thing, which is why we didn't go right away for the neck, because it wasn't consistent with a neck injury. Looked at everything else, and we figured out it's not that. Let's go, let's take a look at the neck. And then it was that."
Rhodes confirmed that he, too, felt that Owens had some issue during their match at the Royal Rumble, as he sensed that his legs weren't working as they usually do.
