Initially deciding to take time off, Ivar would wind up getting an MRI after he was unable to lift his arm on vacation. The results of the MRI were so bad that, combined with a past neck fusion surgery, Ivar thought his wrestling days were over, and even received mental health documentation in preparation for dealing with the end of his career. He would be under that impression for the next five days, until he went to visit his surgeon in Birmingham, Alabama to go over the MRI results.

"He read the results of the MRI himself," Ivar said. "He's like 'Okay, we can work with this.' So with my original injury, I did a suicide dive and my head got pushed back, and two of my disks exploded into my spinal chord, which caused the temporary paralysis, and then pretty much emergency fusion surgery after that. 

"This one, the herniation happened...instead of shooting in towards the cervical cord, it went out and away from it. So he was pretty sure we could probably...because my symptoms were too bad, we could probably rehab it without having to do surgery. And if we did have to do surgery, he knew a different surgeon who could go in and just shave the herniation down arthroscopically, which wouldn't require fusion. So he said, on multiple occasions, that I had dodged a very big bullet."