I was wrestling in a soiled wrestling ring in Albany, NY, and took a halfhearted bump. The mat was so dirty that my right leg stuck to it. As I twisted free, I wrenched my knee. A couple days later, I rubbed my leg against another dirty canvas in St. Petersburg, Florida, coming away with mat burn on my elbow. When the grime penetrated the raw exposed skin, the bacteria traveled down my body and settled in my already inflamed knee.
A few days after that, outside of Philadelphia, I was startled awake in my hotel room. My knee was inflated like a balloon, with red lines streaking up my thigh to my groin area. I called the desk clerk, who directed me to a hospital in Chester, Pennsylvania.
Hobbling into the emergency room, I told the doctor on duty, "I need to get this knee drained, I'm the World Wide Wrestling Federation Champion, and I have to defend the belt tonight against Bruno Sammartino."
The doctor was unimpressed: "Fine, lets take the fluid out and send it to the lab, and find out what's in you knee."
When the results came back, he was more frantic. I had a staph infection, and needed to be checked into the hospital.
"Can't you just drain the knee?" I implored.
"We can. But if you check out your going to die."
In the operating room, the doctor gave me a local anesthetic, tied down my arms with velcro straps, sliced me down to the bone, pulled apart my skin and tissue with a pair of grippers, and began scraping chunks off my knee bone. The bone itself wasn't numb, and the when the scalpel scratched against it, I nearly leaped through the ceiling. The pain was unbelievable.
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