Ben Askren is shedding more light on his recent health scare and how and why he ended up in the hospital in the first place.
Askren, 41, was discharged July 22 after 58 days in the hospital and is already working to regain strength after losing 35 pounds. He recently revealed he needs to use a walker to get around and struggles to lift five-pound weights. But he vowed to build back, and serve as an inspiration for others in the process.
But how did this all come to be? Askren said he was largely blindsided by the sequence of events.
“We went one day and I thought it was a back spasm,” Askren recently told FloWrestling. “I got medicine, and it didn’t work at all. So we went back the next day. I remember walking in, and that’s it. I had my surgery on June 28. I don’t think I came to until July 1 or so. It’s a huge chunk of time in there where I don’t remember anything.”
“… I had a lot of pain in my back. I’ve had back spasms before, so I kind of thought that’s what it was. Honestly, thank God for my wife. Because I was kind of fighting it. I was like, ‘No, I’m going to watch this guy at the Bitcoin conference. I don’t want to go to the hospital. It’s one of those things where had I waited another hour or something, it might’ve been a wrap.”
Waking up in the hospital without recollection
Askren doesn’t remember anything from May 28 to July 2. After his initial admission, he was med-flighted from Las Vegas back home to Wisconsin.
“After six days or something, I believe they flew me back here (home),” Askren said. “I believe I was on a medical flight because they did something called ECMO that keeps you alive. They didn’t have great ECMO in Vegas. So we got a med-flight back here. They had to have me on two ECMO machines to keep me alive. I guess I kept deteriorating from there. I wasn’t awake. At some point, they said, ‘This is not going to work. You either need a lung transplant or he’s gone.’ It was basically bacteria or the virus was eating my lungs.”
Askren recounted the exact moment he regained consciousness in the hospital and the thoughts that went through his mind, unsure of what had happened. It was three days after the procedure.
“It was at night, so there was no one else in my room,” Askren said. “So I’m like, ‘Oh sh*t. How did I get here?’ In my head, I tried going through all the things that we’d done. I didn’t even know what day it was. I try to go through everything in my head that I’d done. My first worry was, ‘Holy f*ck, I hope I didn’t do something dumb and crash a car, or something did I?’ That was my first intuition. So then I started trying to think through all the places I was going and all the things I had planned for June. It took me a long time. Eventually, I’m like, ‘Well, I remember going to the hospital and I don’t really remember anything after that.’ Then obviously, I think at some point a nurse came in and after morning Amy came in, and told me what happened.”
In addition to his newfound appreciation for his inner support circle, as well as outsiders (and even some former rivals like Jorge Masvidal and Jake Paul), Askren said he woke up not only spiritual but religious.
“I woke up and I decided I was a Christian,” Askren said. “So that’s crazy. I’ve went with my wife to church for 15 years. That was part of the deal. I said, ‘I’m not a Christian, but I’ll support you.’ It was really weird. When I woke up, I was like, ‘I’ve got to do it.’ That was kind of weird. I have so much gratitude for everyone who has helped out.”
What’s the medical prognosis?
Askren received a double lung transplant and has a long road back to recovery. There are two time markers that Askren said will signal progress.
“After six months, the chances of rejection, the chances your body could reject a new body part, whether it’s heart or lungs or kidney or whatever, after that, the chances of rejection go way down,” Askren said. “After a year, it goes way down. If I can get to six months, I’ll still have to take the precautions. When I get to a year, obviously, I’ll still take all the medicine. I’m not going to be a dummy. I always tell my wife, I’m a little bit crazy, but I’m not a dumbass. I’m not a dumbass. I don’t want to die. I have zero desire to die. So I’m going to take necessary precautions.”
In the meantime, Askren said he’s going to take it relatively easy while also working as hard as he’s allowed to. He’s taking a break from wrestling but will still try to assist with The Askren Wrestling Academy. Coaching is his passion, but Askren revealed for the time being he’s not permitted to be in places where there are large crowds.
“I’m going to take a ways off coaching because of all those injury-type things that can happen,” Askren said. “I can’t be around big groups of people. That makes me all sad because I had some really cool things planned in July in August that I’m not going to get to do. I’ll find something else fun to do. It’s going to be weird because I’ve been grinding since I was 15 or 14. I don’t stop. I get up and I bring the heat every f*cking day. Now it’s like, I can’t. I pretty much stay at my house here on my computer or find some other way to help AWA. That’s going to be a challenge. It might be fun the first couple weeks after the kids go to school because it’s peaceful. But I bet it’s going to get terribly boring.”
