Bea Priestley (Fka WWE's Blair Davenport) Opens Up About Having Brain Surgery As Teen

For much of her twelve year career, which as seen her wrestle in Stardom/New Japan, PROGRESS, AEW and WWE, under the name Blair Davenport, Bea Priestley has mostly managed to stay healthy. It's a stark contrast to Priestley's life before wrestling, when a serious health scare over the course of several years left her life in danger. Appearing on "Rulebreakers with Saraya," Priestley was asked about the situation and was more than willing to share her story, and how her normal life suddenly changed early in her teenage years.

"I was fine until I was, like, 14, and then all of a sudden, I started having these really violent seizures," Priestley said. "Like, only at night time...I tried to tell my parents, but because they didn't know anything about it, they just thought I was having panic attacks. So I was sent to therapy."

Therapy proved to be unhelpful, and Priestley noted she'd have several seizures that she had no recollection of, seizures so powerful that they would send her off her bed and into her bedside table. The breaking point occurred when she and her parents flew from New Zealand to England when she was 15, and she suffered a seizure so bad that she had to be strapped into her seat. At that point, her parents realized it was something worse than panic attacks.

"So when we got back to New Zealand, they sent me to a neurologist, and they found out I had a brain tumor," Priestley said. "But it was on my skull. So what they think was happening was I was born with it, but as I was growing, when I was in my teenage years, my brain was growing into the tumor. And it was just, like, constant."

Priestley was put on medication called Tegretol, an anticonvulsant that helped quell the seizures, but left her "feeling like a zombie" during her high school years. Eventually, the medication stopped working around the time Priestley moved to Auckland, New Zealand to pursue a wrestling career. Her seizures got so bad that she once blacked out coming home from work, waking up to find herself in an unfamiliar place, and that she couldn't eat without flat mates around or sleep with the door closed, in case a seizure occurred.

"It got to the point where I wasn't even allowed to have a job because if I had a seizure crossing the road, then I could endanger myself," Priestley said. "I pretty much got house locked. And that's when my dad...so my dad drove from Wellington to Auckland, which is 10 hours, and he drove there and back to pick me up, drove back the next day. And then, I think they told my neurologist and then, maybe a week later, I had emergency brain surgery."

Priestley admitted that if she had not had the surgery, the tumor would have eventually killed her. Fortunately, she received a clean bill of health shortly after, and has remained fine every since.

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit "Rulebreakers with Saraya" and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription