Joel Farabee Reveals How He Severely Injured His Neck During a Workout

"I was doing incline bench on one of my first days in the gym in the summer," he said. "And I was just warming up, it was pretty light weight, like not hard at all. And I just reached back to rack the weight and I felt this really weird pinch in my neck."
I wasn't really sure what happened," he said. "But then a couple days later, I started having a lot of nerve pain and things like that. So I ended up going to get checked out, got an MRI, and they found a herniated disc in my neck. I ended up getting the surgery about two weeks later."

"Yeah, I think for him, obviously him being the first guy to get the surgery, you can understand why it happened the way it did with the team not wanting to do it and things like that," Farabee said. "But I talked to Jack before I got my surgery, and he gave me a lot of good info on like rehab stuff and things like that. So I felt really comfortable heading into surgery, and as soon as I woke up from the surgery, I felt light years better than I did before. So I'm really fortunate to have a great surgeon in Dr. Yoon, who ended up doing my procedure. Since then it's just been great. I haven't had any issues."

"When I got my surgery, I was the first surgery of the day, and they wanted me to stay the whole day and spend a night there," Farabee said. "And I think within two or three hours, I was walking and moving around, so they let me leave. So I feel like in terms of recovery, I felt like I was able to get back into things pretty quick. I was on the on the ice probably a month and a half, two months after surgery. Training camp kind of sucked not being able to participate fully. But I did what I could and got my body to a point where I was able to play."