Cara Noir talks recovering from his serious foot injury.
At the beginning of 2023, Cara Noir suffered a serious foot injury in a steel cage match with Spike Trivet that took him out of action for over a year, returning at Progress: Wrestling Never Sleeps in August of this year.
While speaking to Fightful's Corey Brennan in a recent interview, Cara discussed his injury and the process behind his recovery.
"Yeah, I was told I wasn't going to be able to wrestle again. I was also told that I probably won't be able to walk again. After the diagnosis, the misdiagnosis originally, and then not fully finding out the details of the break for about 18 weeks. So after the cage match, like a week later I went and got married and then I went back to the NHS and I support the NHS and I love that we have have that system, but they're so over prescribed at this point, overworked, they aren't able to give me the care that, thatas a sports athlete I needed. Because of the injury was so complex. A lot of people would say to me in the NHS, it would have been better if you'd broken your femur because we could have fixed that quickly. So after about 12 weeks of, oh, it's going to take 12 weeks and then it will heal up. Then realizing that it hasn't healed at all was quite traumatic. In that period of time, I'd been holiday. And then we had to then go seek special private care. Sitting in that office and being told that you may not be able to walk again or you may not be able to return to wrestling was a really tough pill to swallow. Still like now, it still makes me very emotional remembering that feeling. But the best advice he gave me is we can do this surgery and it's going to cost a lot of money. The advice that he gave me was, your leg is atrophied and you've been on crutches for three, four months by this point. You now need to go use it. You can't break it any more than it's already broken. So go and walk on it. He said, leave this office and go do some squatting. So it's exactly what I did."
Cara continued, detailing how he built back up strength in his foot and how he began to see the success in April of this year.
"I spent most of last year building my way up to be able to take load weight on it and start to walk and then run and then researching different ways to treat broken feet because it's surprisingly more common in certain athletes. Then I just built up strength and strength. Then by the time I went back to see him, at the beginning of the year, this was April, I was surprised to walk back in and see a smile on his face after he'd seen all the MRIs and x-rays. That took me a long while to accept that my foot had fused back together, by scar tissue, not by bone on bone, by scar tissue. I'm so thankful during that period of time that we raised such a large portion of money. Unfortunately, it turned out that I needed significantly more for the complexity of what it was. Because I'm a man, I was so ashamed of asking for help. Originally, I didn't want to go back and then ask for further help. So I used that money to get the scans that I wanted, see the doctors that I wanted, sort of specialists that I wanted, have the extra treatment and homeopathic treatment and different massages and different ways to actually increase blood flow. So it was a lot of suffering, but the main focus for me at that point last year was not to return to wrestling because it was the summertime and I couldn't spend, I couldn't, take my daughter who's five to the playground. So my goal was just to be able to next summer, I'm going to take it to the playground. The risk of the surgery that we were considering that was significantly more expensive than I was originally quoted, was if it didn't work, they'd have to fuse my foot. That means no athletic performance. I couldn't run, I couldn't do anything. It would have been fixed. Taking the chance to try to heal it myself was the only route that I could have taken."
Cara is set to return to the ring for the first time since recovering from injury at Progress Chapter 171. You can read more about that here.
Elsewhere in Cara's interview with Fightful, Cara discussed his return at Progress: Wrestling Never Sleeps. You can read more about that here.
