Chelsea Green Reflects On Broken Orbital Bone, Wouldn’t Leave The ER Until She Got A Cleared Date

On the August 7 episode of WWE SmackDown, Chelsea Green suffered a broken orbital bone in a tag team match against Fatal Influence (Lainey Reid & Fallon Henley).

Green had just won the WWE Women’s Title at WWE SummerSlam, and fans worried she was going to have to give up the title.

Speaking to Chris Van Vliet on Insight, Chelsea was asked if she knew immediately that her orbital bone was broken.

“Immediately, it happened. I looked at the ref, and people have spotted this. I looked at the ref. I said, “My face is broken, and that was it. I knew. I always know. Wrestlers are very in tune with our body. Athletes are very in tune. You know immediately when something’s wrong, even if it’s like a minor little thing. But I’ve had quite a few things broken. I did think it was my cheek. I didn’t think it was my orbital bone. I thought I had cracked my cheek because I’ve had that before with a broken nose. But I heard kind of a crack, and then I heard a crack, and then I felt a whoosh of heat. Whenever you break something, it’s just your adrenaline takes over, especially in front of a live audience. I should say, when you have 10 to 20,000 people watching you, usually you don’t feel the pain; you feel a big rush of heat. But this was my most painful injury to date, and that should tell you something,” she said.

Asked if she thought about her future and what it meant for the Women’s Title, she replied, “Yes. Not just the week flashed before my eyes, but 13 years flashed before my eyes. Rhea Ripley flashed before my eyes, all of it. I was like, come on! The worst part was I had just said to Sam Roberts, every time something good in wrestling happens to me, it’s followed by something devastating. Something nasty happens to me right after. I have such bad luck.”

On the August 14 episode of SmackDown, Green was given 30 days to defend her title or be stripped of the belt.

Asked if she had a conversation with Triple H about what was next after learning of her broken orbital bone, she said, “No, you know me. I didn’t even leave the ER before making sure that they were able to clear me after X amount of weeks. I was not leaving without a what can I do? What would make you, the surgeons, comfortable enough to say, ‘Okay, fine, on this day, you can wrestle.’”

“If you don’t take care of yourself, and you don’t push to get answers medically, you could be out for as long as you want to be out for. You could be out for ages, just rehabbing. We’ve got so many things wrong with us, all of us do. So I just always want to make sure I get ahead of it. ‘No, no, no. Give me a date now. If I can beat the date, great.’ [It’s] rare, but if I can beat the date, great. So I got a date in Philly that night, and then I went back home. I had a couple of very rough days at home after flying, after coming down from the adrenaline after swelling, all that stuff. It was a rough few days, and then I found a surgeon in Orlando. I went to him, and then I doubled down and made sure I had a written note that said when I could come back, because WWE, they are so careful. They have to be. This is my eyeball, and if I break it anymore, if I break my orbital bone anymore, that means my eyeball drops down an inch. That’s disgusting. It means a plate in my eye. That’s a big deal. So they are always going to be more cautious and careful with us, and make sure that they’re taking care and that we’re 100%. Whereas I’m thinking, yeah, but how can I make this story work, and how can we not drag this out? When’s the soonest I can get in the ring to give the people what they want, so that we can continue to feed this storyline?”

Green did return to the ring in a tag team bout on the August 28 episode of SmackDow, teaming with Tiffany Stratton against the Irresistible Forces (Nia Jax & Lash Legend).

She hasn’t defended her WWE Women’s Title as of yet.