JD McDonagh Details Aftermath Of Suffering Broken Ribs & Punctured Lung: “The Lung Deflated & Fell Away From My Chest Cavity”

A look back at the injury that shelved J.D. McDonagh.

It was back in January 2025 that Judgment Day’s J.D. McDonagh and Dominik Mysterio challenged for the WWE World Tag Team Championship.

During the bout, McDonagh went for a springboard moonsault to the outside of the ring, but when he landed, his head whiplashed off the commentary desk. It was later revealed that McDonagh suffered broken ribs and a punctured lung.

While on Off The Ropes, McDonagh detailed the aftermath and shared that while he was in the ambulance, they loaded him up on fentanyl and oxycodone. He stated that his lung was folded in half inside his chest.

“Oh! That’s a good one. I’m glad you asked. So, first of all, in the ambulance, they shot me up with a bunch of fentanyl and oxycodone because I was having a real, real hard time in the ambulance once my adrenaline wore off. My breaths were getting really, really shallow and my heart was speeding up because I was panicking and was making me trying to breathe more… It was a whole thing. When I got to the hospital, they got this tube that was about the diameter of your little finger, and they stabbed it between my ribs… My seventh rib broke and punctured my lung from behind, and the lung deflated and fell away from my chest cavity. Because my lung’s folded in half inside my chest. So, there’s loads of blood coming through the lung. Blood and air leaking from the lung into your chest cavity, but they gotta get out, so that your lung can re-expand. So they stick this tube in anyway and they put me on suction to pull all the blood and the air out, and I sit on that machine for a day and a half, and the lung comes up, a little bit, it inflates a little more by itself and they turn the suction down a little bit, and I sit there on the machine for another day. They turned the suction off, see if my lung starts inflating and it did. They removed the tube, and I sat there in the hospital bed for another two days to see if the lung was gonna stick to the wall of my chest cavity. On day five, they gave me the all clear and they said, ‘You can drive home.’ Yeah, because if I flew, my lung would have popped again.”

McDonagh returned to in-ring action in April of that year. He is still a part of The Judgment Day faction.

If the quote in this article is used, please credit Off The Ropes with an H/T to Fightful for the transcription.