Paul Heyman says he worked multiple episodes of WWE Raw while hospitalized with an infection last year, traveling back and forth between his hospital bed and the arena with a catheter and a PICC line still in place.
Speaking on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet, Heyman tied the illness to a pattern he says recurs each year. “I always get sick right after WrestleMania, because I wear myself so down going into WrestleMania,” he said. “I always end up with a sinus infection, or bronchitis, or an ear infection. Something goes wrong with me the week or two after WrestleMania every single year.”
In the weeks after WrestleMania 41, the issue was more serious. Heyman said he passed several kidney stones, and that one of them cut his urinary tract, leading to an infection that spread. He said the inflammation pressed up against his prostate and the infection began moving through his system. “The last place you want an infection like that is in the urinary tract, because it’s tough to get rid of,” he said.
He was admitted to White Plains Hospital, where he said the situation was complicated by a penicillin allergy and antibiotics that were not working. “The infection is getting worse, my temperature is rising,” Heyman said, adding that staff brought in specialists as his condition failed to improve. He credited the hospital for its care: “Shout out to White Plains Hospital, because wow, they took wonderful care of me.”
Heyman said he was not willing to miss television. He said he checked himself out on a Monday morning, arranged his own travel to Raw, did the show, then returned the same night without telling anyone. “I chartered a jet on my own to Raw, did Raw, flew on the WWE jet back to White Plains, checked myself back into the hospital, didn’t tell anybody,” he said. He said he repeated that routine for roughly two weeks while still under treatment.
Heyman said the on-air segment in which Jey Uso accused him of betraying Roman Reigns was done while he still had the catheter and PICC line in place. “When I did that scene, I had a catheter and a PICC line,” he said. He added: “It is rather uncomfortable. It is next to trying to book the rebirth of ECW in 2006 perhaps the most miserable experience of my life.”
Heyman said the emotion in the segment was real, in part because of what he was dealing with physically, and that he would not sit out while The Vision, the Seth Rollins faction he had just helped launch, was new. “There was work to be done, and I wasn’t going to miss work,” he said.
Asked who he felt accountable to: “I’m accountable to the audience that wants a coherent storyline. That’s been my audience for 40 years,” he said. “I’m accountable to Paul Levesque, who depends on me to show up. And I’m accountable to my own health, and going to Raw was better for my health than just lying in that hospital bed.”
He said the travel and the performance did more for his recovery than the treatment did. “The 18 hours that it took to travel to Raw, perform, and travel back did more for me than any medication that was fighting off the infection, because I love what I do,” Heyman said. He compared it to the mindset cancer survivors often describe, where a positive outlook helps carry a patient through. “Going to work was the greatest medicine that I could possibly inject into my own system, because I love what I do,” he said.
