Brie Bella’s injury at WWE SummerSlam turned out to be more serious than initially reported — but she’s just delivered fans the update they were hoping for.
Speaking on The Nikki & Brie Show, Brie walked through the full ordeal following her broken scapula, and it was scarier than most realized in the moment. She explained that WWE medical staff first examined her inside U.S. Bank Stadium, taking advantage of the venue having its own X-ray room.
WWE Medical Team Quickly Assessed The Injury
Doctors initially wanted to rule out a dislocation, but the X-rays instead revealed multiple fractures, and given the nature of the trauma, she was told she might need to go straight into surgery that same night.
The nice thing is, is we were lucky to be at a stadium, the Minnesota Vikings stadium, because they had an X-ray room. So they wanted to see first if it was dislocated. And then when I went to the X-ray room, that’s when they saw the breaks. And then they were like, ‘She needs to go to the hospital to get a CT scan.’ And because it is trauma… they thought I was gonna have to go straight into surgery that night.
From there, Brie was sent to a county hospital for a CT scan — and ended up waiting there until 4 a.m. as the on-call orthopedic surgeon worked through several trauma cases, including patients from three separate car accidents who arrived around the same time she did.
County hospital is the last place you wanna be. I was there till 4:00 AM… There was three different car accidents that came in the same time I came in. So we get into the hospital and then I get my CT scans. But it takes a long time for the results because the orthopedic surgeon… was doing surgery, so we were waiting quite a bit.
No Surgery Required
When the surgeon finally reviewed her scans, the outlook shifted for the better. According to Brie, he told her he’d never seen someone break their scapula from a human cannonball before — but the good news was that no surgery would be needed, since there’s simply nothing to operate on for that type of fracture. The bad news, as he put it, was that all that’s left to do now is let it heal.
He looked at me and he goes, ‘I’ve never had someone break their scapula from a human cannonball before.’ He said, ‘The good news is, you don’t need surgery. The bad news is, there’s really nothing we can do except let it heal.’ And then from there, you guys, I’m out three to six months, so it all depends how my scapula heals. I like to think us Bellas, our bones heal quick, but the scapula is kind of a tricky one.
Brie is expected to be out three to six months while the fracture heals naturally, with her exact timeline depending on how her scapula recovers. She joked that the Bella sisters tend to heal fast, but admitted the scapula is a notoriously tricky bone.
