Ladies & Gentlemen, Dudes & Dudettes, it has come back around to another Matt Burns Week for the TBT Weekly Blog, and well this week will actually be my last turn for the Blog in 2020 (Don't panic I will be still continuing on in 2021). I will say that 2020 has been a unique year for sure however, I will say no more as I feel that I will most likely save my throughs for the year for the TBT New Years' message that will most likely be released on New Year's Day.
Last time on the Matt Burns Early Years, I explained how my love for wrestling began and slowly grew into becoming the beginning of my journey to becoming a wrestler. This week I have decided to talk about how that journey almost had a very early end, due to a very unfortunate situation.
I had been doing the wrestling training for almost 6 months on a Sunday every week (at least 5 hours at a time). I loved going to the training sessions every week and was something that I had always looked forward to because I would be learning something new be it a new move, a new technique, or a whole new idea to consider for myself.
During this time my love for wrestling only grew even bigger, to the point that I would aim to watch any and all wrestling shows as much as possible, which I will admit that there was a lot of channel swapping happening due to the Monday Night Wars between WWE Raw & WCW Nitro because I didn't know which one I wanted to watch first.
Now the hard work and effort didn't go unnoticed at wrestling training either as I was being told and advised that I may be ready for shows soon and that I would have to consider getting myself prepared for a likely debut. I will say I was excited to hear this news and well it had me going back to some of my notes and thoughts I had while in High School with my friends during the discussions that we had (which was mentioned in the previous of this series).
Now during the time of being all excited about preparing for a possible debut, a situation slowly began to develop that I am sure no one could have ever predicted to happen. I started to feel groggy, very sleepy and getting headaches that were borderline feeling like a migraine at first, which started to cause me to have sleeping issues.
At first glance, I and a few others thought that it could have just been either a viral bug or a form of the flu, so I made sure to have plenty of fluids in me and the usual things that you generally do when you feel a bit under the weather.
Unfortunately for me, it didn't just go away as the situation developed much further as I got more tired and sleepy, the headaches got much worse, and other symptoms started to develop that you knew something clearly wasn't right, which one of them was that my skin had started to turn yellow and others (which I won't mention what they were due to being unpleasant in nature).
Soon enough an all-important phone call arrived at which point my parents were informed that they would need to bring me to the hospital as soon as possible while making sure that I stayed awake until it was safe to do so, which could have become a tragic ending but I am so grateful that it didn't.
So after going through that situation, I knew I had to take time away from wrestling training completely because we had no idea what was the cause of my illness was and I was advised medically by the doctors to put it on hold.
To find out where and what was the cause, they ended up having to have a sort of liquid gamma-ray put through my body while scanning me (btw it didn't burn, it was freezing cold and I didn't hulk out when I was angry either).
Eventually, the answer was found and it was called Meckel's Diverticulum which I bet has you wondering what the hell that is. I won't go into the details of what it is but I will say between 2 & 3% of the general population have had it (Also be warned when looking it up, it can be a bit graphical).
I will say once we had the name of the condition it did make things a lot easier because just knowing what it was, did help put the mind at ease but it also meant that we had a direction to head towards, which involved an important operation to have it corrected and then moving onto the healing process.
The healing process I will say did take a long time but it was necessary and I had to make sure that I had fully recovered before I could even consider taking a wrestling bump without knowing what it could do to me. It took just about a year to fully recover before I could even consider the thought of going back to wrestling training.
The mental doubts that I had throughout that process of healing I will say almost had me wondering if I could even attempt it or not, the many questions of what if's arrived, but that all come to a complete stop as soon as I got given the all-clear by the doctors. It was a massive relief to experience.
Now before anyone even had the chance to ask me when I was considering going back to wrestling training, I was right back there that Sunday the same week, because I had missed it so much but I didn't rush back into it either, I made sure to take my time and make sure that I was actually in fact fully healed before I considered going all out in training.
On top of returning to wrestling training, it really did help me out that I didn't go alone, as one of my high school friends had finally decided to go with me for the first time, who I will say has had a few wrestling names but the most recent name he used is Alex Zander (and someone I knew wanted to be a wrestler, just as much as myself), who was detrimental in helping me return to wrestling training and helping push me to aim to be a better wrestler, even to this very day.
With that being said, I think that will be a good time to finish off this week's blog post. I also have to say thank you once again for reading this and I really hope you enjoy reading it as much as I am typing it all out because sometimes it's good to see what it was like at the start, all the way to the now.
Please don't forget to tune into The Burning Truth live this Sunday at 6 pm (UK Standard Time) with my fellow broadcast partners James Irvine & John Bloor.
Hope that you all stay well and stay safe.
It has been emotional, chat to you again soon.
