WWE star Raquel Rodriguez recently did an interview with “The Takedown on SI.” Among several other topics, Rodriguez talked about her skin condition that kept her out of action in WWE for several months:
“It was definitely the hardest part of my life because it was like everything just crumbled at once. I’m getting a rash on my skin, so I’m looking in the mirror and I’m not recognizing who I’m seeing. I’m going out in public because I’m still trying to wrestle, and I’m still trying to be a part of this company, but I can feel people looking at me, and my confidence was starting to wane on me. I was just not feeling good at all being in public areas or talking to people.”
“I had come down with it in November, and then I was trying to heal, heal, heal. Finally, by February, I thought I had a good handle on things, so I came back for Elimination Chamber. Somewhere in between the makeup at RAW and the wrestling and jumping on a flight to Australia and the flight to Australia, my face just blew up. I woke up on the plane. I was popping all these Benadryls on the plane because I was like, it’ll go down. It’ll go down. I’m sure it’ll go down. Then by the time we landed in Australia, it was not down. So of course, I had to go see a doctor. I had to get a steroid shot just to help get me home pretty much, you know, get the swelling down so that I could get on a flight to come home. It helped me get through the match. I couldn’t wear makeup because my skin was just still so sensitive and red.”
“Coming back from that was hard because it just got worse once I got home. The best part about it was that I was home. I was with my family. I had my parents here to support me. They were helping me non-stop, but there’s still something about being a grown up and having your dream job and then having all of that just taken away from you. People in my life that were supposed to be my friends, I no longer heard from. They just kind of disappeared, and so I just kept trying to tell myself, you know, this is going to be a challenging thing, but this is a challenge of my faith. This is a challenge of my ability to fight back and my ability to keep just pushing forward as long as it takes. I knew it was going to take a long time. All the doctors told me it was going to be a journey, but I just kept telling myself, we have to keep pushing forward because this will all come to an end. It has to come to an end. Nothing lasts forever, right? If you can stay on a good track of trying to find that healing course and just being positive about yourself, that for me is what helped me.”
“I had to learn how to regulate my stress, I had to learn how to cook better for myself, how to make better choices when it came to supplements and foods and things I was putting in my body, because my body just wasn’t detoxing. It wasn’t getting rid of all the stuff that we’re exposed to every day.”
“I had a mixture of things. So the first doctor told me I had mass cell activation syndrome. Then all of my dermatologists kept saying it was just eczema. I got tested for all of the autoimmune diseases. I think what happened was a bunch of things at once, and my nervous system just broke down, and I had a really big attack on my nervous system. My lymphatic system wasn’t detoxing like it was supposed to be. So I think it was just a whole lot of things that were happening in my life at this time that just kind of attacked my immune system and then put me in that position.”
On if she felt her career was coming to an end:
“Oh, yeah, 100%. I think that’s any athlete or fighter’s or wrestler’s position, when they do get injured, or when they are taken out, it’s like, all of a sudden you’re busy, busy, busy and you have all these things. You have RAW, you have SmackDown, you’re on the road, you have interviews, you have appearances, and all of a sudden it just stops, and for a second you’re like, I’ve been doing this for so many years. This is what I’ve been working for. This has been my dream, and now it’s just gone. What do I do? What’s next? I think that the hard part for a lot of us is that we struggle with what’s next. I had to think about it for almost a year. I was like, Okay, I’m not going to tell myself that it’s completely over because I feel like I can get over this and I can get through this, but I do need to have an idea of what I am going to do if this doesn’t work out. It really put a big perspective into my mind when it came to wrestling and my real life and what I’m going to do outside of wrestling. Wrestling is the best thing ever. I love it. It’s been my dream since I was a little girl, since I was watching my dad do it, but I know I can’t do it forever. My body won’t allow me to do it forever. It definitely puts into perspective a lot of things, but you do get that scaredness of like, this has been my rock for years. This has been my relationship. This has been my life. This has been my everything. What am I going to do now? It was like having a breakup with wrestling, but not fully. This might be harder than a real breakup. I don’t know.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit The Takedown on SI with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
