During a recent appearance on the “Cheap Heat” podcast, R-Truth commented on dealing with a serious quad injury last year and how he felt it may be the end of his in-ring career at one point during his recovery.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On how bad things got: “I mean, I had a hole in my knee. A hole. I had five different bacteria’s that caused an infection along with MRSA, staph, and their cousins and kinfolks. It started off as a routine quad tear. As a matter of fact, I tore my bottom quad. And they went in — I guess it could have happened during surgery — but I went to get the stitches out and that’s when we found out that the bacteria, the infection, was eating from the inside out, so that’s where the hole came from. I just remember the doctor never would give me a high-five. He was like, ‘We gotta get this under control. If we can’t get this under control, I’m gonna have to think of the options.’ He was straight shooting with me: ‘You’re in the woods big time. We have to get this under control.’ Like, it wouldn’t heal. It would not heal.”
On how long it took to treat: “So then I had to go three months, I had to have a wound VAC. It was a VAC that was on my knee that kept sucking the old blood up and putting the new blood, all that stuff, like I had to wear that for six weeks along with a PICC line. So I had to have that for eight weeks. I did that, and once all that was over with, the stitches started coming out on their own. So I had stitches coming through my knee out by itself, so my body wasn’t agreeing to them – so I had to go back into surgery for a third time. Third surgery. And the infection was still there, so I had to get another PICC line as well. So, man, it was just a good four months, five months of just trying to kill the infection, slow it down, stop it, not go mentally crazy because there was a chance, he said, the other option was amputation. You know what I’m saying? So to go from doing the 24/7 [title] stuff, running around, doing things with my kids, to NXT, me and Grayson Waller tearing it down, and doing things to like stopping and then getting told this? It was a big reality check, man. It was a pump the brakes moment.”
