Chris Jericho Opens Up About Ailment That Took Him Off AEW TV Last Year

At the end of 2021, Chris Jericho dealt with some very serious physical issues which kept him out of action for a couple of months. On the latest episode of "Talk is Jericho," the former AEW World Champion opened up about the health scare.

"I was really having problems walking," Jericho said. "I was supposed to go do kind of a sideline reporting thing at one of the football games, one of the soccer games here in town ... I basically had to cancel ... About an hour later, I get a call ... 'You have blood clots, we can tell by the blood that we drew. You have to go directly to the hospital.'"

"I was just thinking, 'Give me some pills and I'm on my way'," Jericho said. "They tell me very soon after, 'Yes, you've had a pulmonary embolism'. What does that mean? It means that your lungs are filled with blood clots and you are now staying in the hospital ... They went and did an ultrasound and found that there was evidence of a clot that had been in my throat. Now, if a clot gets in your throat, that's getting into stroke territory."

Jericho was in the UK while this was happening, very far away from his home in North America, and from AEW, where he was accustomed to performing weekly. He had to get a CT scan and an ultrasound, and that wasn't the worst of it.

"They had told me that you need blood thinner and I remember just waiting for this blood thinner and I'm getting a little bit like, freaked out," Jericho said. "The shot goes right into my thigh and I'm not sure if it's because it works faster or whatever it may be, but it hurt like a motherf*cker. It was horrible ... [Oxygen levels] are supposed to be 100, you know, 98, 99, 100. Mine was down to 92 and they said, 'If this goes lower, we're going to have to put you on a breathing' — not a breathing tube, but put you on oxygen."

Jericho ended up losing weight following this scare and returned to wrestling on "AEW Dynamite" on January 26th after not wrestling since November 13th. Since his return, he's reinvented himself as both the leader of the Jericho Appreciation Society and as a self-proclaimed "wizard."

If you use any quotes from this article, please credit "Talk is Jericho" with a h/t to Wrestling Inc for the transcription.