WWE star Kevin Owens 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 âThe Prizefighter,â which he talked about on his appearance on Cody Rhodesâ âWhat Do You Wanna Talk About?â podcast. Owens revealed that the injury happened in a match in January and that he learnt about the seriousness of it in April.
âItâs been such a frustrating process. Weâre 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,â he said. âThe trauma happened in January â well, probably it was building up â 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, âGuess what, you canât even get hit. Donât even get hit, âcause you might die.â
Owens confirmed that he will have surgery sometime next month, four months after his last match in WWE.
âWeâre waiting till mid-July to do the surgery. Hopefully, itâs a normal neck fusion. It might not be. We donât know,â revealed Owens.
Owensâ injury symptoms
Kevin Owens also detailed in the podcast the painful symptoms he has had recently, which he didnât experience earlier.
âSince then, I felt fine, my neckâs been fine. Iâm not in pain, I have no really any symptoms of what you would expect somebody with a spinal cord injury to have,â said Owens. âIn the last week, for some reason, the symptoms all came in one shot. Every symptom youâd expect me to have â the pain in the neck, the stuff going down, the arms, the legs not really responding, itâs all been happening. So itâs been pretty brutal. I canât wait for the surgery and then to move forward, whatever that looks like.â
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.
âSo we had two incidents where basically in the ring, my legs kind of fell asleep and I was like, âThereâs something wrong.â We thought it was one thing, which is why we didnât go right away for the neck, because it wasnât consistent with a neck injury. Looked at everything else, and we figured out itâs not that. Letâs go, letâs take a look at the neck. And then it was that.â
Rhodes confirmed that he, too, felt that Owens had some issue during their match at the Royal Rumble, as he sensed that his legs werenât working as they usually do.