Cash Wheeler knows first-hand that having your jaw wired shut is a nightmare experience.
AEW star Cash Wheeler recently appeared on The Sessions with Renée Paquette and relived the story of him having his jaw wired shut whilst in WWE. Known then as Dash Wilder, Wheeler fractured his jaw during an April 14, 2017 match in Spartanburg, South Carolina against Hideo Itami and Shinsuke Nakamura. The injury required surgery, but it also saw Wheeler’s jaw wired shut while it healed. He told Paquette about the scary experience of waking up from surgery as well as how hard it was to try and eat during the ordeal.
“So, when they told me that [his jaw was wired shut], I did [freak out]. I woke up and I was super drowsy and I was thinking like ‘ok, I’m wired shut’ and I have terrible sinuses, I’m like a bulldog, I can’t really breathe through my nose. I’m still groggy at this point and they give me medicine for like the next week or so and here’s some wire cutters in case you need them so you don’t choke to death. I was like ‘uhh, why would you tell me that right now?’ I had a bit of an anxiety attack, I had to go to another room for a little bit and get drugged up. They told me that right when I woke up and I was like ‘please don’t tell me those things.’ I wouldn’t wish the broken jaw or the wires on anybody. Go one full day without licking your lips, go a day without sticking your tongue out of your mouth now imagine doing that for eight weeks.
“The day they came off, your jaw is kind of lock jaw, it takes awhile to get your motion back. I went straight to Burger-Fi and I got the smallest burger they had and I pressed it down like a pancake and put it in. The first 10-days I lost like 15-pounds. I’d like blend pizza, I found a blend book and there was a blog basically. There was a blog of this lady who broke her jaw and she said like ‘I broke my jaw and here’s what I blend that would taste okay without making you wanna vomit. Even soups, I ordered like $100 worth of soups from O’Charley’s and I would keep it in the fridge and then you’d have to blend it and add water because it was too chunky. So, you’d have to blend it all the way up and I had to buy one of those magic blender things so it would be blended down as fine as possible so it wouldn’t get caught in the wires.”
Wheeler then recalled Itami’s reaction to accidentally injuring him, which was caught on film and included some ‘presents’.
“He did. He felt so bad about it. I have the video somewhere but as soon as it happened you could see I go out on my feet and then I go full Frankenstein and then I fall on my ass and as I’m falling, I grab my mouth and roll the apron and he hugs me and keeps saying ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry!’ He felt so bad, you can see later on in the ring he goes to celebrate and I go to pull my ass up on the apron and I start spitting out my tooth and the ref goes ‘that’s your tooth!’ and I go ‘I know, I’m very aware of it!’”
Wheeler finally returned to in-ring competition on the June 30, 2017 episode of WWE Main Event, which saw The Revival defeat Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows.
Related: Dax Harwood: No One Fought Harder For The Revival In WWE Than Randy Orton
If you use this transcript, credit The Sessions and h/t WrestleZone, and link back to this post.
