Thunder Rosa is injured.
The 38-year-old revealed on Busted Open Radio today that she has been dealing with a concussion and will need “a couple of weeks” to recover.
Rosa’s last match took place on the August 31 edition of AEW Collision when she competed in a four-way against Serena Deeb, Queen Aminata, and match winner Hikaru Shida. Before that, she defeated Deonna Purrazzo in a Bullrope match on the August 10 edition of Collision.
“If you feel like you have a concussion, make sure you stop. Don’t get in there. It’s not worth it. I can tell you… right now, I’m suffering a concussion. So I’m gonna be out for a little bit, for a couple weeks,” Rosa said on the show.
Rosa has wrestled for AEW 21 times since returning from a 16-month injury absence in late December. This includes four matches during AEW’s residency at the Arlington Esports Arena in Rosa’s home state of Texas.
We now know it’s a traumatic brain injury that causes them, sometimes with permanent damage and over time it leads to CTE which leads in a lot of cases to a lower quality of life, dementia, Alzheimer’s and other problems. Look at Bryan Danielson, he had so many concussions, at least 10 in WWE, that it was causing seizures, he got cleared by one doctor but WWE’s refused to clear him, so he saw a different doctor that found the brain lesion that forced his retirement.
So I looked into the testing, right now most football teams are using SCAT5 testing, a combination of baseline testing, questions and symptoms, and then retesting to compare against the baseline. Sometimes they do brain scans/EEG’s. So some of it is still precautionary, but mostly they just know how to test for it now. Typically the more you have the more they make you wait before clearing you.
Definitely a lot more is known about it now. People like Christopher Nowinksi have made understanding this their life’s work. Nowinski claimed he worked for a whole year with post-concussion symptoms for WWE before retiring, and also said he had a 3-year long headache, which is part of why he took it so serious.
Where used to we’d just tell people to “walk it off” we now know better if they are showing symptoms.
But, I think you can also point to money being a reason they take it more serious now, a group of Retired NFL players sued the NFL because apparently the NFL knew about concussions and what they were doing but didn’t step in and do anything. They settled out of court for 875 Million and the NFL never had to go to discovery to find out what they knew. Those that died from CTE got something like 5mm, the ones with Dementia got something like 3 or 4 as did the ones with Alzheimer’s.