Hulk Hogan gave a lengthy interview on The Joe Rogan Experience to promote his CBD line. Hogan spoke extensively about his wrestling career, Brock Lesnar, and a variety of other topics.
On his current back and knee problems:
“Well, I don’t have the movement back. You know, I have a real hard time just doing normal things. Everything’s fused. I’ve had 10 back surgeries, but the thing is, you know, my knees and my hips are so old now because I had the left knee scope three or four times, the right knee scope three or four times, then I had them replaced. Then I had the hips replaced, and they’re all over 20 years old.”
“But you know, all that being said, you know, the body is an amazing thing. With all the metal and all the abdominal surgeries and shoulder surgeries and all this stuff that’s happened to me, the upside is bro, I’m living a good life. I’m happy. I may not be able to run as good as him or walk as good as you, but at the end of the day, I’m seventy years old. I train every day. I eat great. You know, I hardly ever drink any alcohol at all.”
“I don’t take any pills anymore. With all those surgeries, the doctors are just banging me with these pills and different things and the thing that stopped me, this thing that shut me down completely where I said enough is enough is when they hit me with the fentanyl stuff. They almost killed me with that stuff. So that’s when I said, ‘I’m done.’ I didn’t even know they gave it to me, but the morphine and Dilaudid, none of that stuff worked on my back. I’ve had so many surgeries.”
“You see how I just barely moved my little finger. If I just moved my leg that much I’d just scream like a wounded animal because everything was so torqued. Then there’s one night when I don’t know what I was taking. I guess they had me on the Fentanyl things you stick up under your gums and patches on my legs and lollipops. I remember one night my body just completely torqued and my head and shoulders were facing the opposite way. It took a bunch of EMTs to get me out of the house, and when I came back, I said, ‘That’s it. I’m done.’ I called one of my buddies in LA, and they prescribed the Fentanyl to me and the insurance didn’t cover it so it was $2,000 every two days. The pharmacist said, ‘I’ve never seen anybody on so much Fentanyl and still be alive.’ So that was the prescription they were giving me because my back was so bad. They cut on me so much, they compromised the structural integrity of my back by cutting so much bone away that I was just a mess, you know. So one year, if I went to LA, another buddy of mine in Atlanta said, ‘I can get you off in six months’, and I laid off everything I had and I said, ‘I’m gonna get off this crap in two weeks.’
“I had these 150 milligram patches that go on my legs and they would give me these two Fentanyl pills. You’d have to stuff them under your gums in the morning and then at night. They were giving me 15 of these 1500 milligram lollipop things to eat during the day. That’s how drugged up they had me. In the two weeks I laid it all out, I told my ex-wife at the time, ‘I’m going upstairs. Bring me about 15 gallons of water. I don’t want to see anybody.’ The first thing I did was cut the patches in half and put them on my legs like an idiot. I call my pain doctor and told him what I did. He said, ‘Take that sh*t off your legs. That’s how people overdose.’ because their time released and here I’m cutting them in half and putting them on my legs and I’m getting the full blown, so I pulled them right off. I mean, I called him right away to tell him that I did and so that would have been my first mistake.”
“I sat up there and I was there almost two and a half weeks and I sweated through the bed, all the way through the mattress and stuff several times. I had people come in and check on me. I saw my ex-wife’s teeth come out and talk to me. I saw a plastic squirt gun come out of her chest and this is coming off the Fentanyl, but when I came off the Fentanyl I’d lost 35 pounds. I was clean, completely done. The only other time I had it was after shoulder surgery and I got an infection. They had me on a drip line. I kept telling the infectious disease doctor I feel like my lights are going out, brother. Every time I do a two-hour drip in the morning and a two-hour drip at night, I feel like my lights are going out like I’m slowly dying. The infectious disease doctor said, ‘Well, I give the same dose to 80-year old ladies. You need to man up.’ So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll man up.’ Then about day 13, I went down and I told my housekeeper, ‘I’m gonna faint’, and I just passed out, did the splits, balls and butt on the ground. Never done the splits my life, hip pops out, knee replacement pops out, and when I wake up, the EMTs are sticking a needle in my arm. I’m going, ‘What is that’, and they’re going, ‘Oh, we’re giving you something for pain. I said what is it. They said, ‘Fentanyl.’ I went, ‘Oh my God’. So they shot me up with Fentanyl and I didn’t even know it, but I didn’t get back on the train again. Since then, you know, after having 25 surgeries in 10 years since then, when I drink my coffee in the morning if I’m really, really hurt, I’ll eat two Tylenols, and then later in the day if it was to get really bad, because I need a cup of coffee about four in the afternoon because I’ll start to nosedive sometimes I’ll take two more Tylenols later in the day, sometimes I won’t, but done with it all.”
You can check out the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
