Joey Mercury’s face, a raw, inflamed mess with blood still seeping out from his stitches, was scarlet red around his nose and left eye with hundreds of flakes of dry blood clinging to various places on his face.

“I’ve shattered my nose around the bridge area,” said a bruised and swollen Mercury, who was severely injured at last night’s Armageddon pay-per-view in a Ladder Match. “I have four fractures on the inside of my nose; I have 5 stitches on the inside of my nose and my cheek and 15 stitches on the outside of my nose and cheek. My left eye is swollen shut and I have continual internal bleeding from my nose and my eye.”

To Mercury’s credit, the injury that would have knocked most people out cold only left him momentarily stunned.

“I remember everything [about the incident],” he said. “I never lost consciousness and I never passed out.”

“I have nothing to compare it to; I’ve never been hit that hard in the face before,” he said as he paused. “I’d have to say it felt like a hundred-pound steel ladder connecting with my face at one-hundred miles per hour; or going head first through a windshield of a car without a seatbelt on; maybe getting hit in the face with a baseball bat swung by Sammy Sosa.”

Mercury made it clear it was the outcome of the match, not the injury, that was on his mind the day after the ghastly incident.

“Had I not been forced to leave the match due to a severe amount of blood loss, MNM would be the WWE Tag Team Champions,” he said. “Again, we made it clear that MNM is the greatest tag team in the modern era – not The Hardys.”