JD McDonagh Discusses His Scary Injury On WWE Monday Night Raw

JD McDonagh took one of the scariest bumps in recent WWE history on the Jan. 27 episode of Monday Night Raw, and his road to recovery has not been easy.

McDonagh suffered broken ribs and a punctured lung in a match against the War Raiders after hitting the announcer's table on the outside. He opened up to Chris Van Vliet on his "Insight" podcast about how it all unfolded.

"I guess it was in the planning stage really. I needed to be on that side of the ring for something that was going to come up later on," he said. "So I said, 'I'll just do it on the announce table side.' I've done it on that side before, but whatever happened on this one, I just was maybe a foot too far forward or a foot too far back and wiped out."

After he hit the table, he was having a difficult time finding his breath, and didn't realize the severity of his injuries initially.

"In that moment I was just thinking, 'when's the next breath gonna come?' I knew that I didn't hit my head that hard, because I knew I'd missed a spot in the match and I knew what was coming up next. So I knew I wasn't unconscious or anything like that, and then I don't know, it was like an out-of-body experience, listening to Michael Cole with the concern in his voice. I've heard him all through the years being like we got to get a medic down here, and then all of a sudden you're lying at his feet and he's saying it about you," he said.

McDonagh pushed through to the end of the match despite the injuries, but believes there was a possibility it could have been ended prematurely. He said the officials did everything they were supposed to.

"The thought of stopping didn't even enter my mind," he said. "The referee came down, and he asked me what city we were in and what date it was. I told him that I'm okay and I told him where we were and what we were doing. I said, 'Tell Dom that I'm okay and I just need a minute.' He passed the message on, and then the ref actually got a lot of heat for it online, Shawn Bennett. But as far as him doing his job he can only do or relay the message of what I'm telling them and I told him I was good to go.

"One of the WWE docs came out in the ad break. She checked me over, and I knew if she touched my ribs she wouldn't let me back in there. So she'd thankfully asked me about my head and my neck rather than my ribs. And there was a spot coming up in the match where I was needed so I was like, I gotta go."

While he did evade serious long-term injury and a concussion, the incident has taken a lot of out of him. He is trying to get his body back in ring shape, but he has yet to get back into the ring.

"I’ve been in the gym," he said. "I was doing skipping and really low impact cardio for a couple of weeks, and now I've kind of progressed in doing Pilates and other non-impactful. So I haven't taken a bump yet. That'll be the next step. Get back in the ring, hit the ropes. See if that hurts. Take a bump. See if that hurts."

McDonagh said he would like to be back within the next month if possible.

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