YouTuber Jake Paul is lucky to be alive. The controversial social media star just revealed that he had to be rushed to the hospital to receive emergency surgery last week. Wow, we are so thankful he’s okay.
Naturally, the 22-year-old documented everything that went down, which he uploaded to his YouTube account on Saturday, April 6. It turns out, the former Disney star thought he broke his hand during a recent boxing match with Joe Weller. But when it started to get worse and worse, he realized it was much more than that.
“I’m happy to be alive,” Jake said in the new YouTube vid. “I could have lost my hand. I could have lost my whole arm actually. The last few days have been a whirlwind of events — all negative, all terrible.”
The YouTuber went on to explain that it all started when he woke up and his hand was “throbbing like crazy.”
“I have a high pain tolerance and I was in a lot of pain,” he said. “And I was kind of joking around about it but then it got more and more serious to the point where I was like, ‘OK, this is a joke but this also hurts a lot so I might have to go to the emergency room.'”
But after visiting the ER, Jake thought everything would be fine. The doctors wrapped his hand in a cast and sent him home.
“So here I am in the hospital, just being a dumba-s, messing around. I was in a lot of pain but I wasn’t exactly taking this whole thing seriously. But little did I know how serious things would get,” he continued. “So we get back home, right? Everything’s good, I just gotta wear a cast for a couple days. It’s nothing. I didn’t fracture anything, it’s just a little swollen. [The doctors said,] ‘We’ll see what happens, you’re going to be fine Jake.’ No. That is not what happened. I woke up the next day, I’m in more pain than ever. I can’t move, I have a fever, I’m stuck in bed. I’m like dying. I felt like I was dying. The worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.”
That’s when they decided to call for an ambulance. Emergency services rushed to the vlogger’s house and quickly transported him to the hospital, where they discovered that Jake actually had an infection called cellulitis and needed to get emergency surgery.
“There’s a fluid filled collection of infection in that knuckle,” his mom explained. “They’ll have to go in, burst it open, clean it out and get all the infection out of there with surgery rather than antibiotics.”
Luckily, the surgery went well and Jake seems like he’s doing a lot better now. Phew, that was definitely a close call.
And it turns out, the injury didn’t come from a boxing match after all! It actually happened while Jake was filming a prank for a recent YouTube video. The influencer slid down a rope and cut open his hand, which ended up getting infected.
As for his boxing career, things are unfortunately still up in the air.
“The recovery time could be three months,” Jake explained. “But if I re-injure everything it could go back to square one. So I don’t know where this leaves me in terms of boxing. I’m still down to fight people I just need to see how this heals.”
Please be careful, Jake!
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