Brie Bella says she will be out of action for between three and six months with a scapula broken in three places, and that nobody is to blame for it.
Bella was hurt during the six-woman tag on night one of SummerSlam, where she teamed with Nikki Bella and Paige against Fatal Influence. She gave the fullest account yet of the injury and what followed on the latest episode of the Nikki and Brie Show.
She addressed the cause before anything else.
“Which before I get into it, I do want to say that it’s nobody’s fault. My injury. It’s part of the business. And in wrestling, we all sign up knowing. I mean, look at Nikki three months ago broke her ankle in the ring. So we all kind of go in there knowing, like you take that risk. That injury can happen. You never know when, never know what kind of move or when your body, like when it just happens.”
She confirmed it happened on the cannonball into the steel steps, and that she knew immediately.
“So I did break it, and I broke it, you know, for all of you, yes, on the stairs when I got the cannonball, but it was weird because when it happened, I instantly knew.”
Bella has said previously that the match was close to being stopped. Here she described how that came about, with the referee relaying messages from the doctors and from Triple H.
“So for me, it was like the ref knew something was wrong, and she came up to me right after when I was selling on the ground before I got put back in the ring. She was like, ‘Do we need to call the match?’ And in my head in that moment I’m like, yeah right, I am not gonna let them call this match and have all these women and Nikki not doing her comeback yet.”
She kept removing spots as the match went on.
“The ref kept checking on me because the doctors speak to her and, you know, Triple H, everyone speaking to her through her headphone. But so they were checking up on me and they kept asking me to like, you know, stay out, but I kept coming back in. Now, granted, I missed some big moves, and you know, we all had to readjust on the fly.”
“I couldn’t do the backdrop, I couldn’t do the missile dropkick. I think that’s what everyone started to realize, like she’s seriously hurt.”
Bella said she spent the night afterwards being hard on herself.
“Because I was telling Nikki, I was like lying in the hospital that night, feeling like I was just the weakest link, and made the match look really sloppy for everyone.”
Nikki Bella said she worked out how serious it was during the match itself, when her sister could not lift her arm to bring in an opponent.
“It was when you came to grab me to get Lainey for the hot tag, and when you bent over and you go, my shoulder, my shoulder, I can’t grab her. That’s when I was like, oh s***, and I knew something really bad was wrong.”
Brie said the heel turn that followed the match passed her by entirely, and that she threw a few kicks mainly to gauge what she could still do.
The initial assessment was wrong. Doctors believed the shoulder was dislocated and treated it accordingly before she was X-rayed at the stadium, which has its own facility. That was when the breaks were found. She was taken by ambulance for a CT scan and was at the hospital until four in the morning, with surgery a possibility until the orthopaedic surgeon saw the scans.
“He was like, you know, it’s really hard to break your scapula, he’s like, and no one does surgery on scapulas. It’s if you really want it, there is one doctor that can do it. But honestly, it’s like breaking your ribs in a way. You just wait till they slowly heal, and so that’s what I have to do.”
The recovery is measured rather than active. Bella will have X-rays every two weeks to check the bone is knitting, starts physiotherapy in two weeks, and has been told not to train for eight. She is not permitted back in a ring until it has fully healed.
“And then from there, you guys, I’m out three to six months, so it all depends how my scapula heals. I like to think us Bellas, our bones heal quick, but the scapula is kind of a tricky one.”
She said she would post updates after each set of X-rays.
Bella is 42 and had never had a serious injury in her career before this. She returned to WWE full time at the Royal Rumble in January and won the Women’s Tag Team Championship with Paige at WrestleMania 42, the first tag titles of her career, losing them in July. Nikki had only just come back herself, having broken an ankle in March, and SummerSlam was her first match in months.
