AEW star Kenny Omega has opened up about the severity of the diverticulitis attack that sidelined him in late 2023, revealing that the situation was so dire he was told he was at risk of dying. Speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Omega provided a vivid, detailed account of the day he wrestled while unknowingly dealing with a life-threatening illness.
Omega recalled feeling incredibly sick before his final TV appearance in November 2023. “The memory of it’s pretty vivid still,” he began. “I told everyone beforehand. I said, ‘Hey guys like, look, I don’t know what’s wrong with me… but I really don’t feel reliable right now. I feel like I could just keel over… I look at myself in the mirror… I feel like really pale, really blue.’”
He described wrestling through the segment as a “battle of will” and a “mental struggle of, ‘don’t fall over, don’t pass out, just hang on.'” After the match, he was referred to a doctor and sent home, but received an urgent call to return to the hospital immediately.
“I remember going home, getting a call about an hour and a half later, and they said, ‘Yeah, do you mind coming back and just being prepared to stay in the hospital for quite a while?’” Omega recounted. “I said, ‘I’ll pack a bag… and I’ll head to you guys tomorrow.’… [They said] ‘No, like, you need to come now… we don’t want to, like, worry you or anything, but you could be at risk of dying.’… ‘Okay, right, roger that, closed, I’ll be right there, man.’”
The subsequent surgery and recovery were incredibly difficult. “I was actually just looking at the pictures the other day of right after the surgery, and I had lost so much weight, so much muscle was gone from my body,” he said. “They had said, ‘Hey, have no expectation… be happy with any positive improvement,’ and that actually helped to hear that… not to be too hard on myself.”
Even now, months after his return, Omega revealed the lingering physical toll that big matches take on his body. He explained that after a performance like the Anarchy in the Arena match, his recovery is extensive. “I’ll be in bed until like 5pm, 6pm for almost an entire week,” he admitted. “I just can’t, I just don’t have the energy. I can’t move. And that was the most scary part for me is again, you know, I want to be reliable. I want to be someone that you can count on, but at the same time, I don’t want to push myself beyond the breaking point.”
He detailed the specific physical issue he now deals with daily as a result of the surgery. “The big one for me is that I have these, you know, adhesions in my stomach, quite a few,” Omega shared. “And when you’re breathing heavy, when you have to use a lot of core, when you have to twist, when you have to stretch, it’s the adhesions are pulling… they’re binding to my inner organs. They’re pulling apart and it’s causing a lot of discomfort. It causes sort of like flu-like symptoms to emerge.”
This new reality has forced Omega to be more selective and aware of his own mortality in the ring, making every match count. “The ones that don’t mean anything, it’s it’s like chipping away at what’s what’s left, and there isn’t much left,” he stated. “So I want to make sure that what is left and what the meat that is on the bone still, that it’s a, it’s a good tasting meat, you know, hopefully.”
Now back in the ring, Omega is preparing for one of the biggest matches of his career, a title unification bout against his legendary rival, Kazuchika Okada. The match is scheduled for AEW’s All In: Texas PPV next Saturday, July 12.
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit F4WOnline.com with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
