Steph De Lander detailed the personal and financial burden of wrestling for TNA, saying, “I’ve paid for both of my surgeries. I paid for PT for both of them. My insurance maxed out, so I currently have a $9,000 AdventHealth bill sitting there that I’m going to get to at some point. It was 100% covered on my end.” She also explained the difficulty of not having a guaranteed salary: “I was not on a salary. I was not getting paid every week. If you’re not there, if you’re not on the road, if you’re not working, you don’t get paid. So financially it was a very big hit as well.”
Steph criticized TNA’s lack of proper medical infrastructure compared to other promotions, saying, “They don’t have a budget set aside for injuries and a proper medical team. Like at WWE or AEW, there is a fully staffed medical team. They have doctors. They have PTs. They have all sorts of people whose job it is to take care of the wrestlers when they get injured, to rehab them back to full health, and then to let them continue their careers as wrestlers.”
She also described the long struggle to get cleared to return after her neck injuries: “Majority of my communication about my injury was through their chiropractor, who I spent 18 months trying to get a return to the ring protocol out of, and I only got it a month ago.” Summing up TNA’s shortcomings, she stated, “Unfortunately, TNA does not have a setup like that whatsoever. So they really don’t have a setup for injuries, especially for spinal injuries.”
(Source: TMZ’s Inside the Ring)