Talk of Daniel Bryan returning to the ring is getting very serious. This is stemming from recent interviews from both Bryan and his wife Brie Bella. Bryan appeared on ‘E&C’s Pod of Awesomeness’ hosted by Edge and Christian. He says that he was originally cleared by several doctors (prior to his retirement) but WWE still wouldn’t allow him to wrestle. He explained that he tried some experimental testing (from a place called Evoke Neuroscience) and was told by doctors that he had a lesion in the back part of his brain. After he received this news he knew he was done. Vince McMahon asked Bryan to give his retirement speech and end his career.
After his retirement speech, he was contacted by one of the original doctors that cleared him. The doctor asked what happened and why he retired:
“I told him what happened and I said, ‘They found a lesion in the temporal-parietal region of my brain.’ He goes, ‘Wait, hold up, a lesion?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And I don’t know what lesion means to you guys, a lesion to me means you have a cut. I have a cut on my brain. He goes, ‘No. Lesion, in medical terminology, is a very vague thing. It just means something is there. We don’t know what it is, so we call it a lesion in the temporal-parietal region of your brain.’”
Bryan says that in this case, lesion actually meant that his reflexes in that part of his brain were slower than people that they usually test (MMA fighters and other top athletes). Compared to the average person, he was okay. Bryan says that it was all a ‘huge misunderstanding’.
Bryan was about to start a family with Brie and just wanted to be healthy so he took the job as Smackdown Live General Manager. He says that being at ringside for a AJ Styles vs Dean Ambrose match killed him and he questioned what he was doing. He eventually said he wasn’t okay with not wrestling and looked into other options.
Brie Bella mentioned in an interview earlier in the week that Daniel had been undergoing Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Treatments. He has apparently had about 40 done so far. Here is what Bryan said about those treatments that are helping him:
“There’s this vast improvement. And Brie sees the vast improvement. And then Dr. [Barry] Miskin thinks within 120 total treatments, so 80 treatments more, that my brain could get back to where if you looked at it from any other spectrum, you would think that I’d have never done any contact sports in my entire life”
Bryan says there is no reason why he can’t return:
“With all of this positive stuff, there’s no reason why I can’t return to doing what I love. And it may never be full-time and it may never be this idea of ‘I’m going to go in and be the guy who main events every live event and stuff. I’m not even sure I want that. Now that I have a child, I don’t want to be away from her that much. But to say that I can’t wrestle say 50 to 100 matches a year or to say that I can’t do Jerry Lawler and Terry Funk are still doing in their 60s. I also want to give the caveat of this: if at any point along with all of this if somebody said there’s a real indication that I should not be wrestling, I don’t want to wrestle. My health is 100% more important than coming back to wrestling. Being a good father is more important than going out there and expounding on my belief that doing more hammerlocks in wrestling is good for the business!”
Why he wants to return:
“My daughter is one of the reasons I do want to do it. It’s this idea of teaching her that like, ‘hey, whatever your dream is, whatever your version of wrestling is, like, you can do it, and you can’t let.. just because someone says, ‘you can’t do this because we think this,’ that’s not a good reason to stop. I’m doing this more for my daughter than anything else.”
Note: Daniel says he doesn’t blame WWE or Evoke Neuroscience for the misunderstanding.
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[h/t to Pro Wrestling Sheet and Wrestling INC]