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If you’ve watched Raw the past few weeks, you don’t need to be a medical professional to know that something is up with Sami Zayn’s elbow.
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On the most recent episode (Aug. 14), Michael Cole shared the diagnosis: traumatic olecranon bursitis. The olecranon is the bony tip of your elbow. There’s a bursa sac there which serves a cushion between the bone and soft tissue. Trauma to the elbow — in Sami’s case, probably using it for strikes or taking bumps on it — can caused it to fill with tissue and swell.
Zayn discussed the injury on the newest episode of Out of Character with Ryan Satin. The elbow seems to be one of several nagging ones that wrestlers and other athletes accumulate. While it’s an issue, it’s not so much of one that he couldn’t wrestle this past Monday… and use the kayfabe cover from the week before in his answer:
“I’m wearing a compression sleeve right now but you can still see the ball sticking out. It’s not great — I’ve actually had a lot of issues of late that I’m just battling through. It’s funny when I watch sports — hockey players or whatever, after the playoffs are done, you’ll be like, ‘Oh, this player was playing with three broken fingers or whatever’ and all these insane injuries they’re playing through. As I viewer, I just assume everything is fine.
“I’ve been battling along little nagging injuries for some time. But nothing that would put me on the shelf. This is part of a nagging injury that has gotten a little bit worse, after this past week’s heinous attack by JD McDonagh, for which there will be revenge.”
We were also treated to some of Sami’s patent musing about dealing with injuries at this stage of his career:
“But yeah, there have been some little injuries, but — knock on wood — thank God, I’m pretty healthy overall. You start to think about this stuff a little bit more as you get older, and you’ve been doing it for 21 years, and you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s definitely not another 21 on the backside of this.’
“So you’re definitely closer to the end than the beginning, so maintaining your health and addressing those nagging injuries — I think that’ll become more important. But I still managed to give you a long-winded answer to a very easy question. My elbow’s alright, it’ll be okay. It’s not great, but it will be okay.”
The man Zayn holds the WWE Tag Team titles with, Kevin Owens, is currently taking some time off due to a broken rib. But it sounds like KO is ready, his friend & partner will