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What's the story
Roman Reigns' return from battling leukemia is one of professional wrestling's greatest stories.
During an interview with ESPN to promote the launch of WWE 2K20, for which Reigns is one of the two cover stars, alongside Becky Lynch, 'The Big Dog' himself has admitted that he struggled and things got dark when asked if he doubted he'd ever return.
In case you didn't know...
In October on an episode of Monday Night RAW, Roman Reigns broke kayfabe and introduced himself by his real name to the live crowd, before revealing he was relinquishing the Universal Title as he had leukemia and would be taking an indefinite amount of time off to battle the illness.
However, in February Roman Reigns returned to the ring to make the special announcement that his battle was successful, he was now in remission and he was returning to wrestling for WWE.
The heart of the matter
During a recent interview with ESPN, Roman Reigns was asked about his time away from WWE battling leukemia and if there were any particularly dark periods where he thought he'd never return to wrestling,
As soon as we got on the road to recovery, [we] started addressing some of the side effects I was having. One of them was extremely high uric acid levels, [which happens] whenever your blood levels get thrown off. Within leukemia, you have an elevated white-blood-cell count. What I thought was a crazy gout situation due to my diet or red meat or shellfish, that type of stuff, it was just my blood being affected through what was going on.
Reigns went on to add that he had arthritis from his feet to his hips and that he was only able to get through it with doctors and medication.
I had crazy arthritis from my feet all the way up to my hips. So for about the first month, month and a half, I couldn't really walk around much. It was really painful. I was on my butt quite a bit -- a little bit of Call of Duty here and there, a little 2K time. Luckily, through medication and the doctors taking care of me and making the proper adjustments, I was able to get back on my feet.
Once I felt better, it was like, OK, now the light at the end of the tunnel peeked back out. For a second, it was pretty dark.
What's next?
Currently, Roman Reigns is enjoying doing the press rounds for Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw as well as being involved in a 'mystery backstage attacker' storyline across both Monday Night RAW and SmackDown Live.
See WWE RAW Results, Highlights of event, & more on WWE RAW Results page
