Keith Lee had the wrestling world buzzing on Tuesday when he tweeted out, “Got some very much less than stellar news today….No matter the results, tomorrow’s match belongs to my two brothers. It’s all I can do until I return. Love you boys.” Given the health issues he dealt with prior to his WWE departure and the wording of the tweet, many assumed this meant Lee might be out of action for the foreseeable future. AEW President Tony Khan was on Busted Open Radio on Wednesday and clarified that’s not the case. Lee and Swerve Strickland will still compete in the triple threat tag team match for the AEW World Tag Team Championships against The Young Bucks and Team Taz on tonight’s AEW Dynamite.
“I don’t want to get into Keith’s personal business. Keith is here, he is wrestling tonight. He had a family situation. It’s not my place to talk about it. Keith is here and here to wrestle, as I understand it. I can’t really comment on what is happening, but we’re going to support him through what is happening,” Khan said. Lee had previously described the situation with two of his brothers as, “Scary things are about and rough times have taken over.”
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The former NXT Champion went into detail about his health issues back in August 2021 after being inexplicably gone from WWE television from February to July of that year. Following a bout with COVID-19, he had to deal with potentially fatal heart inflammation.ย
“The next day I got a call saying there was something off with my blood. Some people might have experienced this thing where there’s an inflammation in the heart or lungs, for me it was the heart,” Lee said in a video. “And that led to very scary times. I was basically forbidden or any training outside of a light walk. So there was a fear that doing more than that there was a chance that I could up and pass away. So, for three or four months this was kind of the case and I had several MRIs on my heart. By the way, I don’t fit in those machines, it was terrible and my shoulders really struggled with that. But we had to do what we had to do, right? So this became a fight against death, so to speak. It took up until the company sent me up to Pittsburgh to get looked at. And it was up to the point where I was going to have to undergo genetic testing and all sorts of things, because it was thought that there was potential I could have a heart disease of sorts.
“Very fortunately, even though it took a long time we waited that amount of time, that allowed for the inflammation in my heart to eventually go down to normal,” he continued. “Even though the first MRI was bad and the second MRI was worse, over time things got better here and there. Eventually, after that visit, I was cleared to try and get back into some sort of shape. That’s where the real struggle is. But it took some time, and to be honest it wasn’t even certain that I was going to show up in Dallas (where he returned and challenged Lashley to a non-title match) in terms of on TV.”
