Dean Ambrose Says He Almost Died During His Time Away From WWE

Dean Ambrose spent most of 2018 sitting on the sidelines after he underwent surgery to repair a triceps injury in late 2017.

But now that Dean Ambrose is back in action, he’s opening up about his time away from WWE, and it sounds like it was a rough ride for the former WWE Champion.

Ambrose recently spoke to The Monitor about his recovery, and noted that he had to have two different surgeries, and at one point he almost died.

“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 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.”

According to Ambrose he’s not entirely sure when the infection entered his body, but luckily things turned out ok.

“So it was a pretty rough time. My arm wasn’t healing correctly, and my triceps. It’s kind of an indeterminate period where I initially hurt it. I thought it was, we call it Dusty elbows. It’s a pretty typical wrestler thing. You just get this bursa sac of fluid on your elbow from banging it on the mat or whatever. I’ve had that dozens of times on both elbows. It usually just goes away. It was kind of disguised. By the time I finally went and got the first surgery, my triceps was already starting to atrophy and look weird. I wasn’t able to flex my triceps for a really long time. And then the first surgery didn’t really, something went wrong in the process. Probably due to that infection. It’s kind of hard to say when that really even got in my body. This is a long answer to your question. But for a minute there, it was getting scary. By the time I got that second surgery, it was March, I think. My arm was so shrunken and skeletal that it was weird. I hadn’t been able to move it or flex it in so long that I was starting to get scared I wasn’t ever going to get it back. 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.”

Ambrose has been on a roll since returning, and Sunday night he’ll have a chance to win championship gold when he teams up with Seth Rollins to challenge Dolph Ziggler & Drew McIntyre for the Raw Tag Team Titles at Hell in a Cell.