Kenny Omega Injury Update: Still at Least a Couple of Months Away From a Return

Kenny Omega provided a detailed injury update on last night’s episode of Wrestling Observer Radio.

Omega last wrestled at AEW Full Gear on November 13, dropping the AEW World Championship to Hangman Page, and has taken time off to take care of a variety of injuries, including a hernia, shoulder injury, knee injuries and a nose injury, among other things.

Omega said that he was originally hopeful that he would be able to return some time this month, but that’s no longer the case. He said the delay isn’t because of any setback in his condition, but primarily because of waiting lists and delays in getting to see doctors and undergo treatments and procedures.

“The plan – and perhaps I was a little too optimistic – I was hoping to be back by February. And it’s not looking that way anymore,” Omega said. “And that’s not to say that there was a huge snag or something that’s terribly wrong with me. It’s not that. It’s just when you’re trying to get appointments and things fixed, you have it in your brain that ‘oh yeah, I can just call a number and get in the next day.’ Unfortunately there are sometimes waiting lists or there are other complications which create followup appointments and things like that. And of course there’s the whole COVID thing as well (Omega had COVID last month) which has backed everything up by a good two weeks or so. And that caused me to miss appointments, then that extends the time again.

“It’s still on track. I’m still feeling a little bit better as time goes by and that’s without having to do a lot of the major procedures that needed to be done. That’s just myself working with trainers and doing the proper rehab to strengthen surrounding areas of the injured areas of the body.

“So it’s going well and once I actually am able to try to get the knees fixed, try to get the neck fixed, the hernia and all that stuff, hopefully I’m able to move around much better than I was before and kinda look like a guy who was doing what he was doing ten years ago, hopefully.”

He said that he still has to undergo a hernia operation to fix an umbilical hernia and recovery time for that would be about 6-8 weeks and he would then be cleared to return to the ring, since that’s the procedure that has the longest recovery time. He didn’t say when that surgery would take place. So it looks like he’s still about 2-3 months away from returning.

“The hernia is absolutely something that I want to get taken care of now,” he said. “Some of the doctors tell me, ‘you have the umbilical hernia, it’s gonna get bad eventually and you’re gonna have to get it taken care of, but you could let it rip for now.’ I would hate to come back and let’s say something happens where it just tears wide open and my intestines are spilling out everywhere. It would suck to take all this time off and come back and immediately go, ‘oh actually I’m gonna get this other surgery now.’ I wanna get it done now.

“To be able to walk around and live life, that’s like a five day process, but to be able to take impact on the abdomen area, that’s gonna take 6-8 weeks probably before I should be doing anything or would get cleared to do it. As of right now, that’s gonna be the longest recovery time that I have to deal with. So as soon as I can get that taken care of, once that eight weeks is up, that’s probably gonna be about the time when I’m able to make my return. And in the interim, I’ve got various knee treatments coming up and some of them are pretty cutting-edge. Real cool, experimental stuff.”

Omega said that there were times, like during his run with Impact last year, where he could barely walk because of the pain.

“There were times, like when I was at Impact and my hernia got really bad, I recall having to do a run in on I think it was Sami Callihan or maybe on Moose, or both, and every step felt like I was getting poked in the stomach with some sort of sharp object. I remember Scott [D’Amore] telling me after, ‘Kenny, we had to just cut that entire segment. You looked like a 95 year old man walking to the ring.’ It was bad. I couldn’t do a run-in, I had to do like a walk-in. There was no more adrenaline left. All I could feel was the pain.

“Hopefully when I come back it’ll be more of a pain-free — I won’t have to kind of put myself into some sort of heightened mental state to be able to block out the pain receptors. I’ll be able just to focus on the match and the performance and that would be great because I haven’t had that in a long time.”