Marcus “Buff” Bagwell just lately underwent a leg amputation following lingering accidents from a 2020 automotive accident, although he nonetheless intends to “get again within the ring” as soon as he’s healed.
Bagwell, who made his identify in World Championship Wrestling (WCW) within the Nineteen Nineties and had a short stint in WWE in 2001, opened up about his surgical procedure on his YouTube channel on Friday (July 18). Within the video, the place he was joined by his fiancée Stacy Brown, Bagwell stated his resolution to undergo with the amputation would give him “a greater high quality of life.”
“After I look down and see that I’m on the point of amputate my leg, no extra do I begin getting depressed about it even for a second,” he added. “Immediately, I get overwhelmed with pleasure due to the final three years of my life.”
Bagwell revealed he’d already undergone 39 to 40 surgical procedures for knee replacements, flap surgical procedures and extension-mechanism repairs, since destroying his “proper patellar tendons” within the 2020 automotive accident. Nevertheless, his leg by no means healed correctly, main him right into a melancholy.
“That led me into the deepest, darkest [alcohol] habit I’ve ever been in,” Bagwell recalled. “My leg wasn’t therapeutic, and so I used to be tremendous depressed.”
Within the video, Bagwell defined how he’d been ingesting when he took a improper exit and “ended up behind the mall, and in some way, that’s the place all of it got here to the tip, the place I drove by means of a males’s and ladies’s rest room.” Nobody else was injured within the crash.
Bagwell entered rehab for his ingesting in August 2022 and continued to deal with fixing his leg. Nevertheless, issues modified after one last proper knee extensor mechanism restore surgical procedure, which “obtained contaminated.”
The previous WCW Tag Workforce champion revealed he was given a selection between a “20% probability” of saving the leg by means of extra surgical procedures, bodily remedy, and a metal rod, or amputation.
Regardless of the accidents and setbacks, Bagwell described the previous couple of years as “the perfect years of my life.” He additionally remained optimistic about his future, even hoping to return to the ring sometime.
“I’m gonna have the ability to run, and I’m going to have the ability to run higher. I need to get again within the ring, hit the ropes, have a match,” he defined. “You don’t have to surrender with one thing like this… I’m going to indicate the world you can have simply nearly as good a life with or with out a leg.”