The Road to Recovery – Ryan Allan
Injuries happen in professional wrestling, and I am no stranger to getting hurt. Throughout my career, I’ve been heavily concussed, cracked my scapula and I have permanent tissue damage to my left leg. In late 2014, I fractured the c5 and c6 vertebrae in my neck, which kept me out of action for an entire year.
After coming back from a broken neck, I worked hard – I did everything in my power to prove I have what it takes to compete in an EPW ring and I wasn’t taking no for an answer. My pre-EPW career was greatly disappointing, and then I had to have a year off to recover from spinal fusion surgery. Upon returning, I wanted to make a name for myself. After a chaotic four way match at Goldrush and a one on one encounter with Damian Slater at Collision Course, I believe I was just starting to get the ball rolling.
Two weeks before Evolution – a show I was booked on through my efforts –my left knee was totally devastated. Just before my first video, I didn’t realise just how bad the damage was. I was thinking I might be out of action for 6 weeks with an MCL injury. Upon finding that my ACL had also been ruptured and that I’d miss up to a year of ring time, words cannot describe how utterly shattered I was.
People often use the comparison lightly, but it was very much a living nightmare – the best part of my life was snatched away from me for another year at maximum. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
EPW Evolution was hard for me to watch from the sidelines. While a great night, I knew where I was supposed to be and it wasn’t sitting in the audience. It prompted me to go back to the gym, which I was hopeless at after first injuring myself. If there was one thing I did have control over, it was keeping myself in some sort of decent physical condition. I’d be damned if I was going to sit there and feel sorry for myself, letting the rest of my body degrade as I did.
After getting over the initial shock, I told myself that I had two options: I could lie down and quit, or I could keep moving forwards one step at a time. And quitting is not an option to me. I still have much to accomplish in Explosive Pro Wrestling, which I will just have to do once I’m ready to return to the ring.
