Ruby Soho discusses her recovery from the broken nose she suffered at AEW All Out.
Soho went down with the injury at AEW All Out on September 4. At the Zero Hour pre-show at the pay-per-view, Soho and Ortiz unsuccessfully challenged Sammy Guevara and Tay Melo for the AAA World Mixed Tag Team Championship. Soho broke her nose at the end of the match, when Melo hit her with the Tay-KO. She subsequently had surgery to repair the injury.
Speaking on Busted Open Radio, Soho looked back on the past year and emphasized that it has been a rollercoaster. She noted that she has been trying to find her footing and figure out her role in AEW. Soho then described that getting hurt was mentally challenging, but now that she's back, she's excited about the future.
"2022 has been a rollercoaster. It has been me trying to kind of find my footing here in AEW, exactly what my role is, where I fit in, who I wanna present myself as, and obviously getting injured and being out for three months, and then kind of mentally dealing with that. I think anybody on this panel who has wrestled before understands that injuries are almost more mental than they are physical, at least for me anyway. So it’s been a rollercoaster, but I think it’s been really empowering, and I think the best is yet to come for me, for sure," Soho said.
The AEW star went on to detail the mental struggles that can come with significant injuries. She explained that getting sidelined so suddenly and having her lifestyle change drastically is a jarring shift. Soho also noted that sometimes, wrestlers need to take some time off to reflect and recover, and she stated that she had been somewhat banged up.
"I think with this [injury], with my nose being broken at All Out, I think it was because it was so sudden, and I had no time to prepare for it, and you gotta understand that it’s go, go, go, go, onto the next thing, onto the next thing, and all of a sudden, it’s abruptly stopped. You go home, and you’re not going back to work for the foreseeable future because you have to recover, you have to have surgery, you have to do this and that. So it’s such an abrupt stop with no anticipation, and it’s such a change in lifestyle in such a quick period of time, so your brain has to have time to kind of get used to where you’re at now, and try to convince yourself, ‘Oh, maybe I’m missing an opportunity that I could have had if I didn’t get injured.’ A lot of mental difficulty comes with that, but I think at the same time, it’s super important to realize that you need those times. You need those times for things to stop so you can process everything that’s happened in the recent years or months or whatever, and you can really just take the time to let your body recover. My body was hurting, and not even just obviously my nose, but my back was hurting, my neck was hurting. I probably wrestled more in the last year than I had probably in the four years prior to that. It was tough matches with incredible women that go out and put it all out there every time, so my body was hurting. So I think honestly, mentally, physically, emotionally, all of that, it was needed if I’m being honest," Soho said.
Soho then went into detail about her nagging injuries, and she noted that her match against Riho during the Owen Hart Women's Tournament was particularly physical. She made it clear that she felt like her injuries had gradually built up, and they caught up to her after this bout. She also pointed out that there's never a good time to willingly take a break, but substantial injuries remove the choice from the situation.
"As soon as I got injured this last time and I stopped, it [nagging injuries] got more noticeable, but even while I was doing it, even though the schedule was so crazy, I think vividly I remember my match with Riho, during the tournament, after that match was the most pain I’ve been in after a match in a really long time. I don’t think it was anything to do with [Riho]. It was a very physical match, Riho is absolutely incredible. But I think it was just a buildup, and it was a tournament, so I was wrestling quite a bit and moving on in the tournament. But after that, I couldn’t move my neck, and my back was hurting so bad. It was just a pileup to where I was like, ‘Man, I might need some time. I might need some time.’ But you never know when the right time is. If you wanted to take some time away, I’d you wanted to take some time off, you never know because it’s always in the back of your mind. ‘Am I missing an opportunity? Am I skipping out on something that I need to be there for, that I could be doing something great with? So it’s never a good time until sometimes, wrestling just tells you this is the time. You don’t have a choice," she said.
Soho also discussed her difficult recovery following her broken nose. She recalled how she had broken her nose multiple times in the past, so she already had a deviated septum. Soho noted that this break hurt worse than anything she had ever felt, and she also had some trouble breathing throughout her recovery.
“It was about three-and-a-half, four months. So I had actually broken my nose probably seven times prior to my most recent break. I had a deviated septum for a long time. I could not breathe through his nostril. Whenever we got COVID tests, they would stick the Q-tips up my nose, and it would get stuck. It would stop, and then they would have to go to the other one because it was so deviated on this side. But when I got it broken the last time, one, I have never felt that kind of pain before in my life. If you watch the clip back, right after she knees me in the face, you can see my stomach go in because I’m literally screaming, and I’ve never screamed out of pain before in my life. It ended up, my septum went like this, so I could not breathe out of either nostril. I had broken it, so most of this is cartilage. I had my broken my nose, which is just a little space here, in two different places. Then this had just slanted entirely. My nose was so wide and across my face. So I had always had trouble breathing prior to that, but then after that, I couldn’t breathe out of my nose for the first two-and-a-half months that I had, and then I had surgery and everything like that. They put stints in each side of your nose after the surgery. Once the stints came out, which is the most disgusting thing that you’ve ever seen in your whole life, just these long, gross things Exorcist-style being pulled out of your nose, once they came out, I slept like the dead. Like fried, unattractive, drool coming down my face, slept better than I’ve ever slept in my entire life because I could finally breathe. But it was a rough recovery, for sure. Right after that, it was brutal. Not being able to breathe out of my nose for so long and then breathing out of your mouth so much, and then your throat gets dry, and that starts to close up, and you can’t breathe. It’s crazy, some of the things you kind of take for granted that are just normal everyday [things] until it’s taken away from you," Soho said.
Soho returned on the November 30 episode of AEW Dynamite, and she later defeated Melo in her first match back on the December 14 episode.
Catch up on our coverage of AEW Dynamite here.
Check out the card for this next week's episode of AEW Dynamite here.
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