During an interview with the Nothing Beats Experience show, Jake “The Snake” Roberts talked about his battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease:
“I’m just gonna hit on it fairly briefly because we’re still struggling with it. About a week ago man, I just couldn’t quit coughing, and couldn’t breath. That’s not good, you know? And wound up having to get to the hospital and stay for a few days and I wish I could say this was COVID, but it’s not. It’s not. What I’ve got is worse than COVID. It’s something that was passed down to me through the bloodlines, hereditary and all that stuff and it’s not your happy camper stuff man. It’s issues with C.O.P.D. (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). Of course, me being an ignorant son of b*tch, I smoke cigarettes, you dumb f*ck. Guys, if you don’t ever do anything in life, just don’t smoke and you’ll live much happier. I promise you that, really. I mean it’s the bastard companies that hook us all and get us all into that. Such bullsh*t but… it’s serious, for me. I don’t get the right amount of oxygen into my blood and that’s not good and I don’t know how much it’s going to limit me in my future. We’re testing it today for the first time to try and go do something. I know that without the oxygen, if I talk for about 20 seconds, I’m done. I can’t go anymore. It’s not there. So this is gonna be something I’m going to have to work with and the thing that I’m happy or happiest about is that I’m in AEW and they actually give a damn. It’s really wild. They actually care about the athletes, they actually get us the help that we need, they actually set up protocol so us dumb ass wrestlers don’t say, ‘Hey, I’m okay. I can get in there. I got one arm missing, you know? It’s okay.’ Wrestlers just don’t quit, we don’t quit, we don’t quit. ‘Man I can’t,’ you know? That’s what losers do. But, these guys are smart enough to protect us from ourselves and I am so over the top happy with them. The care that they’ve given Lance [Archer] because he does have the COVID and… it’s so weird man how that all happened. It’s like he went down with the COVID and then I went down the next night with this, and it’s like what? But, that’s just the way it turned out and again, I just, all I want to do is get out there and just do what I do man. That’s all I want.”
(quote courtesy of PostWrestling.com)
