Dean Ambrose Says He “Nearly Died” Due to Infection While He Was Injured

Dean Ambrose was interviewed by The Monitor and talked about the “nightmare” he went through after undergoing surgery for a torn triceps in December of last year. Ambrose said that weeks after the surgery, he had to undergo a second surgery for a staph infection and he “nearly died.”

AMBROSE: 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.

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.

Q: How long after the first surgery did you realize you had the infection and would have to have another surgery?

AMBROSE: It looked good. 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. I don’t know if it was in there previously, or if it came after. It could’ve been with me for years. I don’t know. 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.’ I had just kind of got through all of the stitches and all of that stuff. It was a giant mess. I just kept having to start back from square one. I ended up just moving to Birmingham just to play it safe and be with the doctor and best rehab guys. As soon as I got out of the second one, I was flying home, grabbing my dog, turned right back around, got in the truck and drove to Birmingham. I just stayed there for two and a half or three months until they felt like I was pretty good. Once the MRSA really got out of my system, I was working out twice a day. Rehabbing twice a day on top of that in Birmingham. Doing everything possible to try to get my arm working again, and once I started to come back, I started to make a lot of progress over the summer. So I’m feeling good now.

Q: Was the second surgery entirely for the infection or did you still have structural damage to the triceps?

AMBROSE: The tendon was attached when I went in there the second time. But there was all this goo. The environment wasn’t letting it heal correctly, I guess. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know. But they just had to scoop out all this gooey stuff. I didn’t realize how bad it was. If I hadn’t gone in for that checkup, I could’ve gotten seriously sick. It could’ve been even more dangerous. But it all worked out.

On if he kept up with WWE TV while he was out:

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. That was a relief to finally have an answer. But I was just dragging my fist. Trying to find the fortitude to go to the ring every night was starting to get hard. So when I had the opportunity to step away, I just full-on stepped away and mentally checked out.

On his new look:

Right after I got hurt, I cut my hair really, really short. Like, all the way. After it grew out a little bit, I liked it. So I was like, I’m just keeping this. I wanted to do that for a long time, actually. I said, ‘I’m just keeping it like this. I don’t care what anybody says.’