Kota Ibushi Details His Struggle With Mallory-Weiss Syndrome

It was reported back in January that Kota Ibushi was suffering from Mallory-Weiss Syndrome, which kept him from taking part in the NJPW New Beginning tour. It had initially been reported to be the flu, but was later revealed to be MWS. In an interview with NJPW, Ibushi spoke about the struggle in dealing with the condition.

On the New Japan Cup being cancelled: “I’m a wrestler at the end of the day. I know it’s a good chance to be active in other ways, but for a wrestler not to wrestle is the definition of frustration. I’ve honestly been training so hard it’s been tougher than a lot of matches to be honest. We haven’t had to travel either, so taking that into account, too. I really can’t call this down time at all.”

On his Mallory-Weiss Syndrome: “I just felt absolutely terrible one day, and threw up two or three times. What can happen is that there’s this thin connective tissue between your stomach and your esophagus, and that can tear and get damaged. That’s Mallory-Weiss. Apparently a lot of college students get it. If they’re not used to alcohol and binge drink they throw up, and that sparks this issue. For me, it was probably the ‘flu that sparked the vomiting. Oh, it sucked. The flu alone sucked. I had this awful cough, and I felt a bunch of mucus in my throat. I thought I could clear it and couldn’t. Then I coughed really hard, about five or six times and all of a sudden there’s all this clotted blood on my hands. And I had a fever over 40 degrees at the time. I thought, ‘man, that’s it, I’m gonna die…’ And my lower back was in so much pain. Enough where I was thinking ‘I don’t care if I die, as long as my back stops hurting’. Bear in mind, this was at 4AM on the day I was set to fly out to America. Even if I’d dragged myself onto that plane, I’d be nothing but a hindrance to everybody. I wouldn’t be able to do anything, and if I felt terrible on the flight, I couldn’t just ask to be dropped off. It took two or three days for the fever to come down, but the symptoms stayed with me for a whole week. To be completely honest, I’m still a little sore in the stomach area, so I haven’t been drinking at all; I’m not a big drinker anyway.”

On empty arena events: “There’s a lot of different ways of thinking about it, but completely honestly, I’m not a fan of empty arenas. There’s of course a lot of merit to watching video, and you can get a closer sense of the action in the ring perhaps. The thing is though, I’m not really about showing off what moves I can do. I want to be engaging a live crowd. In that sense, I really don’t see the point of running events if there aren’t going to be any people there.”