All Elite Wrestling and Ring of Honor star Dalton Castle recently appeared on the “What Happened When” podcast hosted by Tony Schiavone and Conrad Thompson. During the interview, Castle detailed a severe injury that occurred in 2016. Castle revealed that he suffered a broken back and continued to wrestle for an extended period because the injury was initially misdiagnosed by medical professionals.
Castle traced the origin of the injury back to an amateur freestyle wrestling training session.
“I wrestled for quite a long time with a broken back undiagnosed, really. I, while doing that, I broke my hand in the middle of it. I definitely know the date when it happened, because I watched the entire summer Olympics from the floor in 2016,” Castle stated. “Pulled a muscle is what I initially thought. I had this training in freestyle, and I was this real hard go with this guy, and he cranked his neck the same time my back popped, and he was like, let’s stop. And I was like, yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s stop for the day. And then I went home thinking, nothing’s wrong. And then just woke up in the middle of the night in the worst pain of my life, where I couldn’t lay down, couldn’t sit up, couldn’t move. It was like electric. I was being electrocuted, it felt like.”
Following the incident, Castle visited a doctor but was not given an accurate diagnosis regarding the severity of his condition.
“And then I went to a doctor who he’s like, let’s see if you could touch your toes, which I could. And he was like, you’re probably just inflamed,” Castle explained. “So I took that as good news. I was like, oh, maybe I’m just being a baby. It doesn’t hurt that bad. I’ll just work through it. And he assigned me two weeks of PT. All they did was the ultrasound stuff on me. I spent the next year hiding it and still taking bumps. I would lay on an ice pack up until my music was playing, like every show. And I would tell a lot of the guys that I was working with that I was limited. So they would, if you go back and watch between 2015 and 2016 you can see my partner is wrestling around me to hide me.”
Castle credited his background in amateur wrestling for giving him the mental endurance to tolerate the high levels of physical pain during this time frame.
“I think that’s why I’m able to ignore that I have a broken back for two years,” Castle said. “Because I just think about all the hard things that I’ve gotten through in practice or matches or just pushing myself to cut weight, eight pounds in a couple hours, and then you just realize, oh, I can get through anything. This isn’t so bad.”
Despite the injury, Castle continued to perform and eventually won the Ring of Honor World Championship at the Final Battle event in December 2017. He held the championship for over six months. Castle noted that he experienced severe referred pain in his hip during his title reign and requested to drop the championship.
“It was a mixed feeling being Ring of Honor champ, because it felt like my career is skyrocketing forward while also coming to a crashing end because my body was in so much pain and I didn’t know what was going on,” Castle recalled. “So it was right around this time I start asking to drop the title and I keep getting told no every week. No, no, we’re just gonna figure out a storyline around it.”
Castle eventually learned the true nature of his injury after visiting a new doctor and undergoing a CAT scan.
“I broke two bones on my, I think it’s the pedicle and the spinous process. It’s the pointy part. Two of them broke, which leaves one of the discs mobile, so it would shift, and it started pushing on a nerve,” Castle stated. “And so that’s what I was told by the doctor why my hip hurt so much, because I just had nerve impingement shooting down my leg, 24/7 where I would go to pre-tape day, and I couldn’t stand for more than three minutes. So if I had to do a second take, I’m like, I have to sit down between. I was just putting a brace on, putting pressure on my hip, thinking that was going to fix it. And the doctor was like, oh, no, no, it’s your back.”
Castle received the exact diagnosis during a phone call while traveling for an international wrestling tour.
“On the flight over is when I got a call from my new doctor, where she said, ‘we just looked at a CAT scan of your hip, and I can see off in the corner that you broke your back.’ And I was like, ‘oh, that’s not good.’ And she’s like, ‘no.’ And I was like, ‘but I’m going to England right now to go wrestle for three days.’ And she said, ‘well, try not to fall down, and then we’ll deal with it when you get back.’ She was the best doctor I had, way better than the first one.”
Castle noted that he finally received the proper rest and physical therapy required to heal his back during the 2020 global pandemic, when Ring of Honor halted its production schedule for approximately six months.
You can listen to the latest What Happened When podcast at RingClassics.com.
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