Candid comments from Lyons.
Nikkita Lyons is back in the ring for WWE after recovering from a second knee injury that shelved her for nearly a year. Lyons tore the ACL in her right knee but prior to that injury, she suffered a torn ACL and partial MCL tear in her left knee.
She opened up about her recovery on the newest episode of The Lyons Den. She stated that ‘almost everything’ in her right knee has been reconstructed.
Back to recovery, it’s been a long road. Especially the two knees. Two-knee Nikkita. I’m about to be rocking two knee braces just like Stone Cold Steve Austin. Shout out to you Stone Cold. Love ya Austin 3:16. Anyway, huge inspiration of mine but, going into surgery, honestly the second time, I was like, alright, let’s do this sh*t, right? Because I had done it already and I’ve had the same surgeon and I knew he was gonna do exactly what he needed to perfectly and grateful for that. But, this time was different for me. The first surgery I went through on my other leg was a lot different than this time. The first time, I felt lost, I felt confused, I felt a myriad of things that may not even have a word to describe them. But this time, I felt nothing but pure determination. Pure let me kick my own ass because it’s that time. I’m being presented with certain opportunities and my body was failing me at the time. But it’s not — I think I heard John Cena say this actually in an interview: ‘It’s not the fact that you failed. It’s how you deal with the failure.’ I don’t know if that’s word-for-word but it was something along those lines. How do you handle (it) when you are at rock bottom? What do you do? Do you stay there? Like yeah, I’ve fallen down but I never just laid there. So, I told myself that and I knew there was gonna be days when I didn’t want to do anything because, honestly, depression, you know? Depression’s a real thing and a lot of people go through it. But, what does depression mean? Or when you think of that word depression, depress; deep rest. You need deep rest.
Every day for my rehabilitation in the very beginning, I could not put my leg down. Especially the first time. So I had my meniscus and my right knee repaired. Lateral and medial. I think that’s what it’s called (she laughed), and then my ACL, had a partial MCL so like, almost everything in this knee was just reconstructed. So, that recovery took 10 months. This recovery took eight months and this side, on my left knee, thankfully, I only had to do the ACL so, it’s only been eight months since my surgery and again, this is pre-taped so this is probably dropping nine or 10 months after. But regardless, this one took 10. So, it felt like a little win.
Lyons’ first match back on television was on the 10/15 NXT on CW and she scored a win over Lola Vice with an assist from Jaida Parker.
NXT is presenting their Halloween Havoc Premium Live Event on 10/27 and the Poisonrana Podcast will be reviewing the show on the POST Wrestling YouTube channel.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit The Lyons Den with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
