Arn Anderson opened up the 2016 Royal Rumble installment of his ARN podcast to share that he had COVID-19.
Arn shared that he had a series of tests that came back negative but he indeed had COVID. He explained that he got really sick a couple of weeks ago and it happened during a period when he was off from AEW. Arn did not accompany Cody Rhodes to the ring on night one of New Year’s Smash where Rhodes took on Matt Sydal. Rhodes was brought to the ring by Snoop Dogg. Anderson detailed several of his symptoms including hallucination and seeing ice forming on his ceiling.
As we know, this pandemic has not resolved itself, it’s not being resolved, there’s still issues, now there’s a different strain and there’s issues distributing the vaccine and all the things that are out of our control, and the last few weeks I’ve found out a few things personally. I found out there’s such thing as a negative/positive and a positive/negative test and you can have several tests in a row that are all negative, which I did, and I mean overkill like every other day because I got really, really sick a couple weeks ago, for about ten days and thankfully it was during the period that we were off at AEW and I wasn’t exposed to anybody and quarantined in my house but buddy, I’m just telling ya, I know the symptoms vary hugely from person to person and age group but let me tell ya, I got sick as hell. It scared me to death. I was in the bed for probably a week. Couldn’t drink anything, couldn’t eat anything, I was hallucinating, I was looking at my ceiling and I saw ice forming on the ceiling. So, had one day there for a minute where I couldn’t catch my break and it was a lot of things I had never experienced in my life that just scared me to death so, what I wanna do is just reiterate to everybody out there: Guys, this thing is bad. It’s really bad and it varies from person to person. We have not 1,000 percent turned the corner in this getting better. If anything, we’re going into that peak season and we haven’t even started talking about flu and all that so I’m begging you, as a member of our family, tell everybody you know wear the mask. Do the social distancing, just take care of your health in general. Try not to get a cold, try not to get the flu.
Anderson did return to work as he accompanied Cody to the ring for his match against Peter Avalon. He stated that before he could enter his hotel room, he had to take a COVID test. He said he had the antibodies for COVID but never tested positive for it but he knows for certain that it was the virus.
When I went back to work just to button the story up, my test that you always get with AEW before you can enter anywhere, you don’t even need to go to your hotel room. You fly in, go get a test. The one that I had this past Wednesday morning, all of a sudden I had the antibodies for having COVID which meant I had-had it but at no point did I test positive for it. So, what was going on in my bedroom for a week was absolutely COVID and it was brutal and it was hard to deal with because all I could do, you know, you go days without drinking water hardly because you can’t get it down, you go a week without food, it’s tough. So all I’m asking is let’s just do some common sense things but go the extra mile. For those of us that can do it, do something nice for a stranger, do something nice for a family member, do something nice for a friend and let’s get this thing knocked out.
Over the past several weeks, both Nick Jackson and Chris Jericho shared that they tested positive for COVID in the fall of 2020.
This week, Cody will be responding to Shaquille O’Neal following his run-ins with Jade Cargill on Dynamite.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit the ARN podcast with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
