Mick Foley Was Told By Orthopedic Doctor That His Previous Hip Was ‘The Worst He’d Ever Seen’

Mick Foley comments on his current health and what an orthopedic doctor told him about his previous injuries.

In 2017, Mick Foley would undergo a hip replacement surgery that would address the chronic pain from years of wrestling, also later undergoing knee surgery several times as well. Foley has now shared how bad the damage was prior to his surgery.

While speaking on Insight With Chris Van Vliet, Mick shared how he got to a position where he would be ready for hip replacement surgery, noting that the orthopedic doctor he spoke with had not seen damage to a person’s hip like Foley’s in his 25 years of working in medicine.

“The crazy thing is I’m moving better. I dropped like 90 [pounds]. At one point I’d gone from 372 to 273, and then I may have taken it too easy for the next four or five months and crept up towards 300, but I think I’m down around 275, and hip and knee replacements, those were game changers. I remember talking to Kevin Nash and saying, Kevin, something amazing happened to me today. I said I passed somebody in the airport. I was always the guy where people were like, ‘Hey, sir, you move to the side.’ And I was starting to pass people, which didn’t mean I was fast, and I don’t want to over exaggerate the amount of pain I was in, but I think I’ve got a pretty high threshold. So when I say it was, I don’t want to say agonizing, but it was more than severe. If it was not agonizing, it was agonizing at moments. I would need five minutes to get going after I got off, I stood up out of my seat on a plane, or when I was driving my car, and my kids said that this is what I would do for hours at a time, I punched my right thigh to try to get some feeling in my nerves. When I went at a friend’s request, who’s a physical therapist, she said, I think that’s your hip. And I was like, but the pains in my lower back. But then she explained something about the piriformis muscle gripping onto the nerve, mimicking sciatica. And when I went to that doctor, orthopedic guy, and I saw the hip, I wasn’t dismayed, I was actually happy, because I saw, you can fix this. He said, ‘I’ve been doing this for 25 years. It’s the worst hip I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how you’re walking.’ Once I realized there was hope, and then once I had the hip followed by the knee, it was like a new lease on life. Now, if you were to suddenly transform someone else into my current body, sure, they might think it was hell on earth, but compared to how I felt for like, 10-15, years, yeah, I am doing a lot better.”

Back in September, Foley noted that he was walking better than he had in 15 years. You can read more about that here.