Roman Reigns decided to go public with his cancer battle last year and announced the news to the WWE Universe during a Raw episode in October. However, at the time, he hadn’t provided a lot of information on his condition.

During a recent interview with The Undefeated, the Big Dog opened up a bit more and revealed some scary information on his leukemia diagnosis.

The disease begins in a cell in bone marrow. With time, the infected cells can suppress the production of normal cells and the number of white blood cells increases rapidly.

While a healthy adult has a white blood cell count of somewhere between 4,000 to 11,000, Reigns’ numbers were way up the chart and a blood cell count of over 100,000 was the original reason for his concern.

This led to further examination and when the doctors discovered his enlarged spleen, it was clear that the former World Champion had to take a break from professional wrestling:

“That was the immediate physical scare of having to get me out of the ring, with a ruptured spleen, it’s obviously going to be a major operation, but people can die from it. It was a situation we didn’t want to put ourselves in, no matter how hardheaded I can be.”

Thankfully things didn’t go from bad to worse and after spending 5 months in rehab, Roman Reigns announced last month that he is in remission.

Reigns is now back to a full-time WWE schedule and he is currently scheduled to face Drew McIntyre in a one on one match at the upcoming WrestleMania PPV.