
By.SESSIONS with St. Domonick
by Ely Cocklin
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St. Domonick is back for Summer 2025. The Tulsa artist is out of the shadows and ready to make his long awaited return to music and the Tulsa scene. He sat down with us to discuss his ever-changing career path, growth as an artist and returning from an ACL tear.
Watch the full LIVE Performance on Youtube Here
Elyjah Monks: All right, brother, so everybody wants to know where the fuck you've been.
St. Domonick: It's a very good question.
Niggas been out the way. Trying to regroup, reassess. Respark the energy and figure out what's the next move as far as what I'm gonna do as St. Domonick. I also tore my ACL, so that put a damper on some things.
EM: Hard to perform.
SD: It is. It's very hard to perform with a torn ACL. My mom actually thinks the reason I tore my ACL was a performance way back during the FILA (Fire In Little Africa) days when I jumped off the super high stage, ‘cause we still don't know. It's still a mystery to this day how I tore it, but that's beside the point.
EM: Did you find out you tore it later on?
SD: Yeah, actually, it was weird. Initially, they told me whenever I went to see about the pain in my legs and they told me it might be a torn ACL. Then I went back on a follow-up a couple of times and they said it might be like something called bursitis, or it might be opening stages of arthritis, or it could be some kind of infection or anything like that. I don't know. They told me multiple things, but initially it started off with an ACL tear. And that's what I was running with.
And then after about six or seven months of it still being prolonged, and still not being taken care of, because the Oklahoma healthcare system is so trash that I didn't get any results back for six months, and just being around and self-treating and self-medicating, that I walked around without even knowing, thinking it was bursitis. That's what they told me.
EM: You were trying to treat it.
SD: And trying to treat it as bursitis, you know, because there were multiple, I'm not going to go into full details, but there were other things happening because of the torn ACL and me not treating it that there ended up being worse effects and it got infected.
At the time, I wasn't taking care of myself the way I was really supposed to. That's just the honest truth about it. So this ended up being my learning experience about being an adult and getting insurance and making sure that I'm always covered and being able to take care of myself. All that type of shit happened during this experiment.
And so, yeah, bro, it was just walking around for so long on a torn ACL that it got infected and I ended up having to get surgery. And thank God that I did when I did, because they said that whatever was in me had spread to my blood system that I would have probably- it could have been fatal…
It ended up working out the way it was supposed to. I was dating a girl at the time that really convinced me to actually go to the hospital because I was being stubborn and like I said, it had been such a prolonged experience for me not getting any real results from trying to figure it out that I kind of gave up and started self-treating myself and said, ‘fuck it.’
EM: With the system being as kind of fucked up as it is, it's hard to go back and trust that they're actually going to give you something that works.
SD: Exactly.
EM: You know? And then it's like maybe you know, you said stubborn, but also it’s not for no reason.
SD: Right. You're getting a little mentally exhausted. You get discouraged. Like, do you care? You know what I mean? For example, I went to one spot and got blood tests done and X- rays and not catscans, but MRIs and all types of stuff. And I had a primary care physician for the first time and she was acting like she really cared about what was going on and was concerned, but she was the one that left me hanging for months. At this point, I wasn't mobile. I was Uber-ing and I lived downtown, so it was hard for me to get to where these medical centers were way out south. So I'm spending money trying to get this figured out and not getting any answers. So, what are we doing this for?
I pulled up one day, and whoever her secretary was, her assistant at the front desk, was like, "Oh, she didn't call you? She's been on maternity leave for about four months now.” And I'm like, ‘yeah, you should probably hit me up, because MyChart hasn't updated anything with any results.’
EM: Because of no communication, I could have been left with something fatal.
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