The reality star broke three bones in his ankle when he fainted in Mexico.
Casey Woods hasn't walked since injuring himself on Bachelor in Paradise more than four months ago. As fans saw on Monday night's episode of the series, Casey fainted after stirring up some drama on the beach, but it turned out that his ankle injury was far more worrisome. ET has reached out to ABC for comment.
"I've never had a fainting spell before... It honestly happened in a matter of seconds. The last thing I remember is turning to Rodney and saying, 'I feel dizzy. I think I'm going to pass out.' And then I woke up on the ground," he recalled on the Bachelor Happy Hour podcast. "... I open my eyes. I don't realize that my ankle is just destroyed. I actually tried to get up and that's when I say, 'Oh my God.'"
When he looked down and saw his ankle for the first time post-faint, Casey said "it looked like almost if you had wedged a football into my ankle."
"They quickly put me in the ambulance, which I did not fit in. I'm 6'3" and I literally had a third of my body hanging over," Casey said. "They had a sweet EMT holding my ankle and we had 30 minutes of unpaved roads. My leg is just going up and down. If it wasn't so painful it would've been the funniest thing you've seen in a Zach Galifianakis movie or something."
When he arrived at the hospital in Mexico, "they have to put me under [to] do a reduction on my ankle, which is basically putting it back in place." Afterward, Casey said, "They wrapped me up, put me in a splint, threw me on an airplane."
After Casey got home, doctors discovered that he had broken all three bones in his ankle, which he called "this insane, unexpected [thing], a bad break, as the expression goes."
"I had three weeks before I could even get surgery because the swelling was so bad," Casey said. "... [For] a little over a month, [for] 23 hours a day [I was] in bed, leg up, couldn't do anything. Thankfully, my loving parents took me in and took care of me in that time and I couldn't be more grateful."
Eventually, he underwent the surgery and returned home to Miami, Florida, but the journey didn't end there.
"About a week and a half ago I was expecting to get the news that I can start walking on a cane again," he said. "They did X-rays, they said, 'One of your bones has shifted just a little bit and we really feel like we can make sure you're 100 percent [in the] long run if we give you another surgery.'"
So now, more than four months after the incident, Casey is still in a cast and using a knee scooter to get around.
"The knee scooter is the accessory of the summer, now scooting into fall. Everyone's loving it," he joked. "Quite an unexpected turn of events and just really sad. But at the same time, thank God I didn't hit my head on anything. When it comes to fainting you don't know what's going to happen."
Casey's injury came after he told Brittany that Peter had been saying negative things about her, and got "overwhelmed" by the drama that ensued. Even so, Casey said that he does "100 percent stand by the choice to let Brittany know that somebody was slandering her."
"First of all, I heard Brittany's story first hand, the fact that she was slandered before. I think she absolutely deserves a right to defend herself," he said. "And by the way, she had the full right to not confront him if she felt like, 'You know what? He's going home anyway. I don't want to make a bigger deal of it.' That was 100 percent her choice."
Casey said that his choice to tell Brittany was totally because she deserved to know, not in an effort to score her rose. In fact, he made an effort to tell Brittany about Peter's comments prior to the night of the rose ceremony.
"I also 100 percent knew that I was not getting a rose from Brittany, and that's where it gets a little tricky," he said. "The night that I heard that from Peter, I immediately went to go tell Brittany so she could deal with it, and she was making out with Andrew. There was not a lot of daylight in terms of what was going on."
Season 8 of Bachelor in Paradise airs Mondays and Tuesdays on ABC. Follow along with ET's coverage of the show to stay up-to-date on all the drama on the beach.
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