Jim Ross has been told the mass on his kidney is unlikely to be cancerous, and is dealing with severe headaches while he recovers from having a shunt fitted in his brain.
Ross returned to Grilling JR for the first time since the surgery, and set out where things stand.
“I’m doing pretty good, doing pretty good. Slowly but surely, but I’m just fighting through it.”
The kidney appointment came on Wednesday.
“I had my oncology appointment because I saw a mass on my kidney, and I got good news on that. The oncologist thinks I don’t have any cancer, but they’re not sure. There’s a lump there. It may be cancerous, but it’s so small they can operate on it and eliminate it.”
He would rather not.
“The last thing I want to do is get cancer surgery, and then go back to the friggin’ hospital for a few days. This last stay was eight days. So I got good news on that. So I’m blessed there and thankful.”
He said he barely slept the night before the appointment.
“I didn’t sleep very good Wednesday night, because I didn’t know I was going to get a verdict of, well, JR, here’s a story. And thank God that wasn’t the case.”
Further tests and another MRI are scheduled, and he could not give a timeline beyond that. The brain surgery was to fit a shunt, which drains excess fluid.
“They drill a hole in. They put a tube in from your brain down to my stomach, so all that excess fluid could drain there and make things better.”
He has not felt the benefit yet.
“I haven’t noticed a lot of improvement since I had the surgery a week ago Wednesday, but my brain surgeon says I’m too impatient. He said, boy, you got a thick skull. You’re hard headed.”
The headaches are the immediate problem, and his kidney is limiting what he can be given for them.
“The wound is one thing, but working on my brain is another, and the headaches are prominent and bad. Because my kidneys were questioned, they couldn’t give me very powerful pain medicine, so I’m kind of suffering through that.”
“When I go to bed at night, if I roll the wrong way on my head on my pillow, it wakes me up. That’s not fun. Rest is the thing I need the most right now.”
He has also fallen twice, most recently two nights before recording.
“I fell in my bedroom, and I fell into my bench. When I fell, I broke the son of a b**** and crashed and burned. I heard some cracking. I thought, oh my god, I’ve broken some ribs, but it was the bench that broke.”
“Falling is s***, man. If I take my time and don’t get in any big hurry, especially when I change direction, I do pretty good. If I don’t take my time, I go right back to that walker, and using a walker in your own home is humbling.”
His handyman repaired the bench, which belonged to his late wife Jan.
“I didn’t want to get rid of it, out of sentimental value.”
He was direct about where his head is.
“I’m old, but I ain’t dead.”
“So I’m healing, just not as fast as I’d like, but I am healing. I’m anxious to get this stuff behind me and get back to doing some work. I miss calling matches.”
Ross is 74 and has been AEW’s senior commentator since the company launched in 2019. He said last month that his AEW contract expires this month and that he does not know whether it will be renewed, adding that he does not want to be finished but would accept the decision.
His most recent commentary appearance was at Double or Nothing in May. He was at WrestleCon in Minneapolis over SummerSlam weekend alongside Conrad Thompson, signing for what he described as long lines.
