In the Survivor 48 premiere, castaway Kevin Leung suffered the first injury of the new season during the opening challenge when he injured his shoulder while navigating the course. In the episode, we hear Kevin mention injuring himself, but the show quickly glazed over the moment and there really wasn’t much follow-up about the moment at all in the episode directly after nor in the second episode of the season.
To the casual viewers who simply watch the new episodes and don’t keep up much with the post-episode interviews, it was easy to watch the episodes and assume Kevin’s injury must not have been anything severe at all and perhaps was just a minor injury that caused some soreness but nothing that hindered his gameplay.
At first, this seemed to be done by design with Jeff Probst seemingly hinting that the injury was minor and had no impact on Kevin’s game which is why the editors chose not to include the moment in the premiere in which he had to pause the challenge to call in medical for an evaluation. Even with that knowledge, it seemed that Kevin’s injury was mild and that it required quick treatment but didn’t impact Kevin’s gameplay.
Well, it seems that could not have been further from the truth.
As we learned after the elimination of Stephanie Berger, she was surprised by how much the show downplayed Kevin’s injury revealing that it was so bad that he was forced to use a sling for support and had to have his shoulder popped back into place. Stephanie started a conversation that has grown since regarding just how serious Kevin’s injury was and now Kevin is speaking out directly about the injury which was apparently so bad he blacked out on the beach.
“I'm glad you guys wrote about it because I think it actually made me recollect like, ‘Oh wow, all these things happened.’ I don't even remember blacking out. I remember that kazoo in my mouth because I remember I was just like, ‘Help! I need help!’ And they were just like, ‘You got this.’,” Kevin told Entertainment Weekly when recalling his injury during the first challenge.
Kevin confirmed he indeed had to use a makeshift sling as Stephanie alluded to in her interview and revealed he did his best to cover his pain so that his tribe members didn’t see him as a weak link. The pain from the injury was so bad that he struggled to sleep and wept on the sand as night fell.
“I actually had to make a sling out of the only jacket that I had. At nighttime, I didn't want any of my tribe members to feel like I was really injured. I couldn't sleep at all with my shoulder because of the pain, so I just went out to the beach and wept on the sand at night, and I came back in the morning and tried to put my best face forward and best attitude.”
As Kevin told Entertainment Weekly the injury was quite severe as he recalled it completely ripping out of the socket preventing him from even lifting his arm. While the show did give him ibuprofen for the pain, Kevin revealed that due to him having no food or sleep he “kept throwing up the ibuprofen, and I was just throwing up water the first three or four days.”
This is a longwinded way of saying that Kevin’s injury was most certainly way worse than the show led it to be and it’s honestly quite surprising CBS chose not to show just how bad things were for Kevin. While they might have hinted the choice was because it had no impact on his game, that doesn’t seem to actually be the case.