Big Show Details Health Struggles, Dangerously High Heart Rate; Was In “Constant Agony”

Big Show was a recent guest on The Steve Austin Show and opened up to the Stone Cold about his recent health struggles:

“I didn’t have my hip replaced. I had a surgery done called resurfacing which I kept 98% of my bone. If I showed you the pictures of what my femur bone looked like – what the ball socket looked like – man, it had holes in it. It looked like a bowling ball. I showed it to Undertaker and he said it looked like a jack o’ lantern. There were just holes from where I had worn the bone down so bad. It hurt for 3.5 years and then I started losing range of motion. I noticed for me in the ring – you know when a guy is working and his strides are long? You know when he is hitting the ropes or he’s shooting somebody in the corner; but, I noticed for me that my steps were just really short because I couldn’t open my stride up anymore because the pelvis had grown over the bone. There was no range of motion and the joint was chewed up. There wasn’t any cartilage left. I was in constant agony; but, you know how we are: stuff that could put a guy in the hospital, you and I have a cup of coffee and a couple aspiring and we go to work. When people look at it and say, ‘How could you even walk like that?’ I had to go to work. I don’t know. It’s just mind over matter, I guess.”

Big Show talked post-surgery set-backs including a serious infection that had him going under the knife once again:

“I had a little complication after surgery, which happens sometimes when you put metal in the body. That was a real tough kind of time. It added 5 months longer to my return. I got a surgical infection from it. I learned more about infections than I ever wanted to know….sometimes you have major surgeries like that and there’s a lot of things that can act up…so I had to go in and be opened up again. They did a real good job of cleaning the joint the best they can…I was on an IV drip all through Christmas for several weeks…an IV line that went from my arm and into my heart because the medicine was so strong it’d burn your veins out. I didn’t want to ask him what it did to my heart if it burned my veins out. I went through that for several weeks which was a real pain in the ass because you can’t work out. I got this tube hanging out of my arm that I had to hook up to each day. I had to do a bag every 8 hours and it took about 2 hrs 45 minutes to drain the bag. I would get yard time in the afternoon. I had about 4 hours to go to the store, get out of the house or go to the gym.”

Big Show details a dangerous moment where his heart rate spiked to deadly levels:

“They told me not to workout. You know how important my fitness was and I made so many changes. I was like, ‘They don’t know,’ so I went to work out. I can do right handed dumbbell curls, something. So, like a dummy I’m in there a couple days after getting this pick line put in and I’ve got a 20 lb dumbbell in my right hand and thinking, ‘I’ll just do a couple dumbbell reps.’ I’d gotten an Apple Watch for Christmas that does your heart rate, probably a damn good thing I had it. I’m sitting there doing these one armed dumbbell curls and all of a sudden my heart rate is really kicking. I look down, my Apple Watch is hopping up and down on my wrist because my heart rate is up to 200 bpm. Apparently when you increase your blood pressure and you have a line in the vein, that vein can elevate your heart rate because you have an obstruction in your vein. When they say don’t work out, they mean it. After scaring the ever loving crap out of myself, I chilled out.”

Readers interested in listening to the episode in its entirety may do so HERE.

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