What happened to him that caused him to develop cucumber pecs?
You were talking about the serious trachea injury you suffered in Puerto Rico. Can you take us through that whole experience?I didn’t realize there was a big problem until later on that night.
I got kicked pretty hard in the throat, but I finished the match. I felt like there was bleeding back there, but the EMTs at the building said there was nothing wrong.
I actually went back to the hotel. My throat was hurting pretty bad, but I just thought it was swelled up, so I tried to eat some ice cream to bring down the swelling back there, but it didn’t help.
Then I tried eating, and I couldn’t eat because it was just so painful for the food to go down.
Then I went back up to my hotel room and stayed there for about an hour or so, and then I felt my lungs starting to get heavy and I was having cold chills. Then I started spitting up blood.
That’s when I called the ambulance, and they rushed me to the hospital, which was an experience.
I’ve been to jail before, and it was like the gates of the jail at the hospital.
There were 20-foot high steel gates and there were armed guards outside the hospital. The opened the door, which creaked, and then they slammed it shut. I walked in there, and there was literally people lined up, bleeding, screaming down the corridors. Nobody was speaking English, and it was kind of freaky.
I was actually at the same hospital where Bruiser Brody died.
So, I was kind of freaked out.
I called a couple of my buddies because I wanted to get out of there. I came in and they took some scans, made me drink some stuff to see what the damage was. That was brutal trying to drink that stuff.
They finally found that I did have a torn trachea. The bad part about it was that it was torn in my chest. They told me I had five hours to live. The air that was supposed to be going into my lungs was now going into my skin. That turns poisonous and then you die.
I still didn’t really want to believe them. My buddy owns a private jet, and he was going to fly it down. They kind of sensed that I wanted to get out of there.
Thank God that didn’t happen, because my lung would have collapsed and they couldn’t have saved me because the trachea was torn. They put me on some sedatives and kind of calmed me down. I was still fighting it and trying to get out of there, because I didn’t want to have surgery in Puerto Rico. Finally, a Puerto Rican doctor came in and calmed me a little bit, but he still sensed that I wanted to leave so he put me under.
The next time I woke up – I had been in an induced coma for two days because the pain would have been so bad – I felt like I was choking. It felt like I was going to drown because I couldn’t get any air. They pulled the ventilator out of my throat and I woke up.
They told me they cut through my lat, basically split my ribs in half, and then cut through my lung, sewed my trachea up. Then they put a tube in my lung to drain for two weeks. I just swelled up. I looked brutal, like a 300-pound fat guy. It was the most swelling I ever experienced. I still couldn’t fly, so I had to take a cruise ship home. I went to get on the cruise ship – and no cruise ship. A guy jumped off and committed suicide, so the FBI boarded the ship and had to circle for like 17 hours. So I had to wait an extra day in Puerto Rico, got on a cruise ship, and it took me another week to get home. I took my tour bus back up to where I live, and I tried to recover. I still kind of worried, so I went to a doctor to see if they did everything right, and the doctor shook my hand and said, “You’re lucky to be here. Those doctors saved your life.” That will mess with your mind.
I was kind of messed up for three or four months, knowing that I could have been dead.
