Along with Randy Orton and CM Punk, R-Truth made his return to WWE at Survivor Series, albeit in a much less dramatic fashion. The former WWE 24/7 Champion had been off TV for over a year after suffering an injury in a match against Grayson Waller in WWE NXT. At Survivor Series, he appeared in a promotional backstage vignette settling a dispute about Ruffles between The Alpha Academy and Pretty Deadly. Spoiler alert: he sided with Alpha Academy.
In an interview with The Ringer Wrestling Show, R-Truth opened up about the injury he suffered and what the recovery process for it was like.
“There was a period, man; I had a hole in my knee, a hole. I had five different bacterias that caused the infection, along with MRSA, staph, and their cousins and kinfolks,” he began. “It started off as a routine quad tear. As a matter of fact, I tore my bottom quad, and they went in, and I guess it could have happened during surgery. But I wanted to get the stitches out, and we found out that the bacteria, the infection, was eating from the inside out.
“So that was where the hole came from, and I just remember the doctor giving me a high five. And that was like, you know what I am saying? He’s like, ‘Okay (unintelligible), we got to get this under control. If we can’t get this under control, we might have to think of other options.'”
R-Truth clarified that he high-fived the doctor after the surgery, thinking he was out of the woods, but that is when the bad news really started to drop.
“He was straight shooting with me,” he stated. “Nah, you’re in the woods big time. Like, we have to get this under control. Like it wouldn’t heal. It would not heal. So then I had to go three months, I had to have a wound vac, I don’t know if you ever heard that before. It was a vac that was on my knee that was sucking the, that kept sucking; I don’t know if that’s PG. It kept sucking the old blood up and putting the new blood and all that stuff; I had to wear that for six weeks, along with a PICC line. I don’t know if you ever heard that before.
“So I had to have that, man, 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 body, through my knee, out by itself. So my body wasn’t agreeing to it. So I had to get 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 straight, a good four months, five months of just trying to take care of 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 stuff, running around, doing things with my kids to, you know, I’m saying NXT, me and Grayson Waller tearing it down, doing things like that. To like stopping and then getting told this, it was a big reality check, man. It was a pump-the-brakes moment.”
If you use any quotes from this article, please give a h/t to Haus of Wrestling and credit The Ringer Wrestling Show