Dean Ambrose Reveals That He Nearly Died During His Recovery Process

Dean Ambrose hit the ground running since his return last month. Since rejoining Raw and eventually The Shield, ‘The Lunatic Fringe‘ will be challenging for the Raw Tag Team Titles with Seth Rollins against Drew McIntyre and Dolph Ziggler. However, things weren’t as good as it seemed.

In an interview with Greg Luca of The Monitor, Ambrose revealed that his recovery process from a torn tricep escalated to two surgeries, including treating a staph infection that could have killed him. Ambrose also discussed the days leading to his injury, new training methods, and how his diet hasn’t changed much.

Here are a few highlights from the interview which can be read in full here:

On returning to the ring after a grueling recovery:

“It’s good to get back out in front of people. I had a lot of frustration I needed to really get out that built up over the last eight months. It was a long, long period of time. Much longer than [I] would have been anticipated. It was just one nightmare after another. It was a pretty challenging period of time to go through. I ended up having two different surgeries. I had this MRSA, Staph infection. I nearly died. I was in the hospital for a week plugged up to this antibiotic drip thing, and I was on all these antibiotics for months that make you puke and crap your pants… To go from not being able to eat my Froot Loops, to being able to get back in the ring and throw people around and throw punches and do everything back to normal, it was a very gratifying feeling.”

On when he realized his arm was infected:

“Before I went in for the first one, they were like, ‘OK, yeah, this is going to be a three- or four-month thing. You’ll jump right back.’ Once I woke up, they were like, ‘Oh man, this is going to be six months minimum. Because we went in there, and that thing was messed up. You beat it to death. It’s going to be a lot harder than you initially thought. But still, not so bad.’ They said they found traces of an infection during the first surgery, but they cleaned it out… But it was about six weeks or so after that I was like, this is not healing correctly. I didn’t have anything to compare it to, because I had never been hurt before. So I ended up going back for just a checkup. I thought I was just going to turn right back around and get on a plane and go home, and they were like, ‘No, you have to go in again for surgery like right now.’ I was like, ‘Oh, no.’”

On being checked out from watching WWE during his injury:

I entirely mentally checked out. I kind of had to. I had been in so much pain for so long when I left, that I was going through some stage-five-level burnout. I needed to just mentally check out of the whole thing. Seeing anything on TV probably would’ve just annoyed me anyway, since I’m out and can’t do anything. Even so, my brain, my level of patience for anything, just from being in pretty severe, my arm was hurting so bad, just this radiating pain 24/7. I wasn’t able to sleep at night for quite some time until they finally figured out what was wrong.