Ben Askren nearly passed away a year ago. Now he is preparing to step onto the mat and wrestle competitively. For anyone who watched his recovery from the outside, that fact alone is difficult to process. For Askren, it is simply the next step.
The cascade that nearly ended his life began with something he dismissed entirely. A staph infection on his elbow appeared to clear up on its own. Days later his back started hurting, and he assumed it was a spasm. It was not.
The infection had entered his bloodstream and triggered necrotizing pneumonia, a condition in which the body essentially destroys its own lung tissue from the inside. By the time he walked into a hospital in Las Vegas, he had no idea how serious things had become.
He remembers walking into the waiting room. After that, nothing. He did not wake up until July 2nd. He had been unconscious for 37 days and had received a double lung transplant.
“I woke up and they told me I had a double lung transplant,” he recalled in a podcast. “I was totally healthy. I’d never smoked. I’ve never done anything. How does someone like me end up with a lung transplant?”
His condition at the time of surgery was so severe that the operating physician described it as one of the worst lung transplant procedures she had ever performed. So much tissue had decomposed inside his chest cavity that it had fused to his rib walls and had to be scraped free before the donor lungs could be placed. He had dropped from a walking weight of around 185 to 195 pounds down to 138 pounds (63 kg), almost entirely muscle loss.
Recovery was methodical and slow. He could not walk unassisted for roughly two months. Getting up from a toilet required help.
His early goals were measured in minutes of walking. Eight minutes became ten, ten became twelve. Eventually he was attempting squats. He was the first lung transplant patient his hospital discharged while still carrying a chest tube, largely because he pushed to leave.
He ended up readmitted for two weeks after an infection developed.
The medical reality he now lives with is permanent. Because a transplanted organ is recognized as foreign by the immune system, Askren must take immunosuppressant treatments, including prednisone and tacrolimus, for the rest of his life. Those d**gs suppress the immune response that would otherwise attack his new lungs, but they also leave him far more exposed to illness than the average person.
“I try to stay out of areas where there’s a lot of people where I don’t have control of what my surroundings are,” he said. “Unfortunately I wear a mask a lot.”
He acknowledged the irony without much hesitation.
“I made fun of the mask people for sure and I’m a mask person. That’s no good,” he noted.
The suppression levels do decrease over time as the body stabilizes. Askren noted that around his one-year anniversary he has been able to come down on several of his treatments, which has improved his energy and overall tolerance. He is hoping to reduce further.
As for competing, the decision to return to wrestling came when he learned that RAF, the professional wrestling organization he works with, was holding an event in his hometown on his birthday.
The medical guidance he has received is not that he should avoid competition, but that he should avoid uncontrolled environments and crowds. A wrestling match, it seems, is a controlled enough environment to be worth the trade-off.
“I take my medicine every day. I wear my mask when I have to. I’m going to try not to be reckless with my livelihood,” he said. “My plan is to be the longest living double lung transplant person ever. That is my goal.”
The current record is 38 years post-transplant. Askren is aiming for 39. If he reaches it, he would be 80 years old.
He is also watching the development of stem cell-grown organs, believing that within 15 to 20 years it may be possible to replace his donor lungs with ones built from his own DNA, which would eliminate the need for immunosuppressants entirely. He has already told his doctors he will volunteer for any promising protocol they want to test.
